> Do you mean salt was worth as much as gold, literally?
EDIT: Deleted my previous comment.
EDIT: I seem to have gotten the story backwards. It was West-Africa who needed the salt, but they had so many gold-mines that Gold was near worthless. Woops!!
So any European who brought salt past the Sahara Desert could trade 1-lb of salt for 1-lb of gold.
This is 100% BS. It probably comes from the same myth that in ancient times, people were paid in salt, since it was sooooo valueable, and ergo, salary.
That's at best a common myth, but was never literally true.
However salt was more expensive than today. But measured in eg hours of the average person had to work for to afford something, almost everything is cheaper today than almost any time in the past. Especially goods. (Services or land, not so much.)
EDIT: Deleted my previous comment.
EDIT: I seem to have gotten the story backwards. It was West-Africa who needed the salt, but they had so many gold-mines that Gold was near worthless. Woops!!
So any European who brought salt past the Sahara Desert could trade 1-lb of salt for 1-lb of gold.