yay egyptians.
this chapter was more about what they did with the salt then the salt in general, which i liked. the egyptians did however make something similiar to soy sauce, i thought we had moved on from the chinese.
those egyptians loved to use salt. especially on foods, vegetables and fish. the rich egyptians used natron to be mummified and the poor used sodium chloride aka NaCl, which i obviously love. in most cultures sodium chloride was used by the rich because it was thought to be better, but those egyptians were kind of screwy. mummification was a big deal to these guys, and good ol' NaCl made it a whole lot easier for this to work, as did those lovely eye onions. YUM.
for a while in this chapter i actually forgot the book was titled salt. this means that mr. k did a great job of interesting me, for once. i really do like reading about those mummies they are lovely.
now onto the salting of food. egpytians loved to salt their food, just like the ol chinese they salted vegetables and put them in jars. they salted a lot of foods, except the pig! the pigs apparenlty carried leprosy and pig owners were banished. good thing i do not live in the land of the egyptians because i love those piggy's and their meat. especially sausage of the link persuasion.
the egyptians also made lovely olives, olive oil, and raised bread. mm delicious. they egyptians got their salt from evaporating water from the nile, maybe some from the mediterranean trade and defintely some from african trade. in chemistry we evaporated salt water, i felt kind of like the egyptians i suppose.
the pheonicans builts an entire empire based on salt and is still a huge salt empire today. the pheonicans traded with everyone they came into contact with. tuna fed on acorns!?
camels transported salt across africa because waterways were not available. caravans of 40,000 camels carried salt 435 miles, thats a long ways. TIMBUKTU! was a huge center of trade, not only for salt, but also for tobacco. salt is a big deal everywhere.
yay salt.
2 comments:
Do you use spell check? You might want to consider that in the future? (ex. Egyptians)
yeah the whole mummification thing required salt, so the connection was easy to distinguish there. Yeah, eye onion thing seemed quite a bit far out & gross.
Glad you were 'transported' for a while, away from having to remember the book's title. If you give it a chance you will see more of this in later chapters.
Many Middle East cultures do not allow for the eating of pork. (ex Jews, Muslims, etc.) They were considered an unclean animal that lived in its own filth. So I hope that explains their aversion to pigs?
Cool linkage to your Chem class. Yeah, in Africa, those evaporating pools were quite a big deal. We will study a bit more about Timbuktu later in the middle of the school year when we look at Africa.
Mr. Farrell
You only have 2 out of 6 entries. While they are good and lengthy, there are not enough responses. This will reflect in your score, which I never post online.
Mr. Farrell
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