At least as early as 1863,[7] various texts have claimed that the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus plowed over and sowed the city of Carthage with salt after defeating it in the Third Punic War (146 BC), sacking it, and enslaving the survivors.
[3] The salting story entered the academic literature in Bertrand Hallward's chapter in the first edition of the Cambridge Ancient History (1930), and was widely accepted as factual.
[11] The English epic poem Siege of Jerusalem (c. 1370) recounts that Titus commanded the sowing of salt on the Temple,[12] but this episode is not found in Josephus's account.
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.
[16]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 (preserving) the infamy of this heinous offender ..."[17] 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.