The Romans did not sow Carthage with salt.

146 BC

No ancient source says so: the salt story appears in books only from the 19th century and was probably modelled on the Biblical tale of Shechem.

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The event

• Third Punic War149 BC–146 BC · Carthage. After a three-year siege, Scipio Aemilianus took and razed Carthage, selling its survivors into slavery. Its land became the Roman province of Africa, leaving Rome the sole great power of the Mediterranean.

2nd century BC

More amazing facts

• 202 BC In 202 BC, empires were decided at both ends of Eurasia: Scipio defeated Hannibal at Zama, and Liu Bang founded the Han dynasty.
• 196 BC · 1802 The British Museum's most visited object is a piece of bureaucracy: the Rosetta Stone bears a priestly decree honouring Ptolemy V, repeated in three scripts, and has been on display almost continuously since 1802.
• 146 BC After destroying Carthage, the Roman Senate paid to translate one Punic book: Mago's 28 volumes on farming.
• 100 BC The word “salary” is often said to come from Roman soldiers being paid in salt.
• 100 BC · 1901 The oldest known analogue computer is over 2,000 years old. The bronze gears of the Antikythera mechanism predicted eclipses, and nothing as intricate was built again for more than a thousand years, until medieval astronomical clocks.
• 100 BC · 44 BC Julius Caesar was almost certainly not born by caesarean section.

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