The first of five clues. Each one below gives a little more away.
Wars were fought over me. Roads were built for me.
The word salary comes from me.
I am the only rock that humans eat.
Gandhi walked three hundred and ninety kilometres to break a law about me.
You shake me onto your food.
Salt
Roman soldiers received part of their pay as salt money — salarium. Every salary since has been named after a rock.
Rome built the Via Salaria to carry it and paid soldiers an allowance to buy it, which is where salary comes from. Before refrigeration it was the only way to keep meat and fish through a winter, so control of salt meant control of food: France taxed it through the gabelle for four hundred years, and the resentment fed into the revolution. Gandhi understood the same logic in 1930, walking to the sea to make a handful of it illegally. Adding iodine to table salt in the 1920s quietly ended goitre across whole countries within a generation.
Reading five clues at once is not the game. In the real thing they arrive one at a time and every wrong guess costs an hour. Play mystery #20 · today's mystery · the vault
Previous: mystery #19. Next: mystery #21. Or try #34, #35, #36, #37, #38, #39.