Salt: More than just tasty

At its height, salt was not just a seasoning — it was survival itself. In medieval West Africa, Arab traders described entire markets where a pound of salt could be exchanged for a pound of gold. In some towns, salt was so rare that people would travel for weeks just to buy a single slab. In the 14th century, one caravan through the Sahara could carry up to 40,000 camels, each loaded with 200-pound blocks of salt — nearly 8 million pounds in a single convoy. To put it in perspective, just one block of salt was valuable enough to purchase an enslaved person, livestock, or months of food supplies.

In West Africa, this “white gold” built empires. The Ghana Empire (6th–13th centuries) and later the Mali Empire thrived on controlling salt mines like Taghaza, where workers dug in brutal conditions surrounded by nothing but desert. Records from the 11th century note that in some markets salt sold ounce-for-ounce with gold dust. Without salt, food spoiled in the Sahel’s heat, armies could not march, and growing cities would collapse. It wasn’t just valuable — it was life itself.

Europe, too, lived under salt’s shadow. In medieval France, the gabelle (salt tax) provided nearly 10 percent of royal revenue, and by the 18th century the monarchy forced every citizen to buy at least 7 kilograms of salt per year — whether they needed it or not. Smugglers caught dodging the tax faced prison, and resentment over the gabelle helped spark the French Revolution. Venice, meanwhile, built a maritime empire by monopolizing the Adriatic salt trade, using the profits to fund warships that controlled Mediterranean commerce for centuries.

China offers an even larger scale. The Tang dynasty relied on salt revenues for half of government income, while under the Ming dynasty salt taxes financed the construction of the Grand Canal and fortified the Great Wall. By some estimates, salt accounted for one-third of the world’s largest bureaucracy’s entire budget — a staggering amount for a single mineral. Whoever controlled salt, controlled the stability of the empire.

Salt even shaped language and culture. The English word “salary” comes from the Latin salarium, the salt rations once given to Roman soldiers. Across cultures, salt was used in rituals, oaths, and folklore as a symbol of purity and permanence. Salt symbolized money, in much the same way that gold did.

Salt’s supremacy ended only in the 19th century with refrigeration and industrial transport. Today it’s sold for pennies a pound, but for thousands of years it was wealth, power, and survival condensed into a single white crystal. Salt was not just worth its weight in gold — it was the hidden currency that built empires, sparked revolutions, and kept civilizations alive.