Salty History.

I just started reading the exact sort of book that I like. It is called “Salt” written by the very talented Mister Mark Kurlansky. It is actually called, “Salt; A World History” and it is about salt. Until about a hundred or so years ago people did not know that salt could be found LITERALLY everywhere, so there were great and busy efforts made to control the small known supplies of this life-sustaining stuff that also made our food taste better.

Well I am only about fifty pages in, but I was reading those fifty pages just now while eating lunch at the local Mexican place and drinking a margarita, so I now feel that I am qualified to give an entire college lecture about the history of salt. I will spare you this lecture, but would like to recount one story that I just read that (while seemingly unrelated to salt) is very, very funny.

The ancient Chinese empire first learned of the Romans (and by extension, the entire Western world) around 139B.C..  The Chinese emperor Wudi had sent an envoy called Zhang Qian off to the mysterious west in order to find allies. Well it took Zhang about six years but finally he reached an outlying Roman outpost in modern Turkistan. Well Zhang got all freaked out at what a fairly advanced civilization he found there. So he rushed home (it took him another 6 years to get back) and reported that an advanced civilization existed out west. Well an army was dispatched to conquer this newly discovered threat on the western front (took them another 6 years to get there, because apparently Odysseus was the most talented navigator of the ancient world and it took HIM ten years to sail from Turkey to Greece [sorry, that is a bitter jab that no one will ever get unless they are 1) an English major and 2) remotely familiar with the geography of the Mediterranean {which no English majors are}]).

So this Chinese army arrives in Turkistan around 102 B.C. and defeats the Roman outpost, then hangs out for a couple years, defeats the outpost again and then heads home (takes another 6 years to get back because they don’t have GPS) and then triumphantly announce that they have conquered the Roman Empire, because as far as they knew, they had.

Well in the intervening couple of decades between when the Chinese learned of Rome and when they “conquered” Rome, the actual Roman Empire had fallen to Germanic invaders, so into the modern era, there were descendants of the Wudi emperor who believed that they had – in point of fact – conquered Rome, never having known that Rome was an actual place a few hundred miles further west than their army had ever gone.

And I think that is funny.

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