Odp: Salt Licks.

junk

----- Original Message -----

From: Mark Odegard

To: cybalist@eGroups.com

Sent: Sunday, December 05, 1999 4:03 AM

Subject: [cybalist] Salt Licks.

I was looking at the entry 'Salt' in the Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture. There are some interesting comments. Beekes and Mallory share credit for the article and dismiss what seem to be some old speculations that *seha(e)l is Western. It does not occur in Indo-Iranian; it also has a-vocalism, which it seems, was not possible in PIE, but quite possible in later Western IE. There is also the suggestion -- a suggestion they dismiss -- that steppe nomads would get their necessary salt from a heavy diet of meat, whereas farmers would need to seek a supplement, and consequently, salt was considerably less important to the Steppe.
Anyway. This is just an idle speculation, but the trade in Polish rock salt is one of the well-known neolithic givens. Salt is also one of those things cattle and horses (and presumably goats and sheep) will willingly migrate to find; a salt lick will keep your cattle centered on the place you put the salt. Salt licks also attract wild game (its illegal here in the US to shoot the deer that visit your salt lick during deer season).
I have nothing beyond this to back this up, but it occurs to me early stock breeders would have valued salt very highly indeed as a means of controlling their animals, so highly perhaps that they would have actively engaged in the salt trade. You have here an economic reason for direct, regular steppe and forest trade contacts. It's not hard to see the IE-speakers taking it over directly. This is just speculation. I might be barking up the wrong tree, but it's an interesting tree.
Where exactly are the Polish salt deposits? And what is the archaeological evidence?
Mark.

Piotr here:

As for the absence of *a in PIE, a well-known phonetic universal says that if a language has three or more than three vowels it's bound to have *i, *u and *a (filling extreme positions in the vowel space) no matter how you analyse them phonemically. PIE *a existed at least as an allophone of *e coloured by the second laryngeal (the consonant I transcribe as *x). It may also have existed independently of laryngeal colouring as a distinct phoneme which didn't participate in the normal apophonic alternations; some comparative equations (typically involving concrete nouns) are difficult to interpret in laryngeal terms. Reconstructions like *kasos 'hare' or *daiwe:r 'brother-in-law' look more satisfactory than monstrosities stuffed full of laryngeals in which some authors so delight.

Certainly something very modest like Nom. *sa:l ~ Gen. *salós would cause less trouble than a disyllabic root like */sexel/, though a paradigm like Nom. *sxa:l ~ Gen. *sxalós/*s@... is also imaginable and could perhaps be connected with *sauso- (?*sax-us-o-, a thematised perfect participle) 'dry' (E. sear, Skt. soša-, Gk. hauos, Polish suchy) via a verb root like *sax- 'scorch, bake dry', possibly occurring in the SUN word. This would only make sense if the IEs had been familiar with solar or thermal evaporation as a method of obtaing salt. I merely want to point out that in phonological terms there is nothing "impossible" or definitely non-IE about the SALT root.

As for Polish rock salt, we can boast the oldest continuously functioning salt mine on earth (ca. 1000; the oldest documents referring to the mine are from 1044) at Wieliczka near Cracow (southern Poland). It exploits a thick deposit of salt from an evaporated Miocene sea. It is a beautiful deep mine with shafts, drifts, galleries, underground chambers (which include a banquet hall decorated with salt sculptures and a 17th century chapel with an altar carved in salt!). Nowadays most of it is a huge museum, a must for tourists who come to see Cracow. The earliest archaeological traces of obtaining salt at Wieliczka (in the vicinity of the modern mine) are from the Neolithic, but I'm not sure about the details. I believe it was extracted by boiling briny water from the local salt springs.

If I find any info on archaeological work at Wieliczka or any interesting photos, I'll post them.

Piotr