Salting the earth Salting the earth , or sowing with salt , is the ritual of spreading salt on conquered cities to symbolize a curse on their re - inhabitation . It originated as a symbolic practice in the ancient Near East and became a well - established folkloric motif in the Middle Ages . Destroying cities . The custom of purifying or consecrating a destroyed city with salt and cursing anyone who dared to rebuild it was widespread in the ancient Near East , but historical accounts are unclear as to what the sowing of salt meant in that process . Various Hittite and Assyrian texts speak of ceremonially strewing salt , minerals , or plants ( weed s , " cress " , or " kudimmu " , which are associated with salt and desolation ) over destroyed cities , including Hattusa , Taidu , Arinna , Hunusa , Irridu , and Susa . The " Book of Judges " ( 9 : 45 ) says that Abimelech , the judge of the Israelite s , sowed his own capital , Shechem , with salt , " ca . " 1050 BC , after quelling a revolt against him . This may have been part of a ḥērem ritual . ( " cf . " Salt in the Bible ) Starting in the 19th century , various texts claim that the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus Africanus plowed over and sowed the city of Carthage with salt after defeating it in the Third Punic War ( 146 BC ) , sacking it , and forcing the survivors into slavery . However , no ancient sources exist documenting this . The Carthage story is a later invention , probably modelled on the story of Shechem . The ritual of symbolically drawing a plow over the site of a city is , however , mentioned in ancient sources , though not in reference to Carthage specifically . When Pope Boniface VIII destroyed Palestrina in 1299 , he ordered it plowed " following the old example of Carthage in Africa " , and also salted . " I have run the plough over it , like the ancient Carthage of Africa , and I have had salt sown upon it . . . " The text is not clear as to whether he thought Carthage was salted . Later accounts of other saltings in the destructions of medieval Italian cities are now rejected as unhistorical : Padua by Attila ( 452 ) - - perhaps in a parallel between Attila and the ancient Assyrians ; Milan by Frederick Barbarossa ( 1162 ) ; and Semifonte by the Florentines ( 1202 ) . The English epic poem " Siege of Jerusalem " ( ca . 1370 ) recounts that Titus commanded the sowing of salt on the Temple , but this episode is not found in Josephus . Punishing traitors . In Spain and the Spanish Empire , salt was poured onto the land owned by a convicted traitor ( often one who was executed and his head placed on a " picota " , or pike , afterwards ) after his house was demolished . Likewise , in Portugal , salt was poured onto the land owned by a convicted traitor . The last known event of this sort was the destruction of the Duke of Aveiro ' s palace in Lisbon in 1759 , due to his participation in the Távora affair ( a conspiracy against King Joseph I of Portugal ) . His palace was demolished and his land was salted . A stone memorial now perpetuates the memory of the shame of the Duke , where it is written : In this place were put to the ground and salted the houses of José Mascarenhas , stripped of the honours of Duque de Aveiro and others . . . Put to Justice as one of the leaders of the most barbarous and execrable upheaval that . . . was committed against the most royal and sacred person of the Lord Joseph I . In this infamous land nothing may be built for all time . In the Portuguese colony of Brazil , the leader of the Inconfidência Mineira , Tiradentes , was sentenced to death and his house was " razed and salted , so that never again be built up on the floor , . . . and even the floor will rise up a standard by which the memory is preserved the infamy of this heinous offender . . . " . He suffered further indignities , being hanged and quartered , his body parts carried to various parts of the country where his fellow revolutionaries had met , and his children deprived of their property and honor . Legends . An ancient legend says that Odysseus feigned madness by yoking a horse and an ox to his plow and sowing salt .