The Hebrew Bible calls it the Salt Sea, and treats the whole basin as a landscape of judgement. Genesis sets Sodom and Gomorrah in the plain at its southern end, describes their destruction by fire from heaven, and leaves Lot's wife standing as a pillar of salt for looking back; Deuteronomy and the prophets use the sulphur and the sterile ground as a standing image of a land under curse. The Quran tells the same destruction in the account of Lut, and its ruins are named as a sign for those who pass by.
Archaeologists have proposed candidate sites, the Early Bronze Age towns at Bab edh-Dhra and Numeira among them, and the identification is not settled; what is clear is that the basin has real salt domes, real bitumen and real seismic history, and that the storytellers were describing a place they knew. The Greeks and Romans called it Lake Asphaltites for the asphalt that rises from its floor and was collected from boats, a commodity Egypt used in embalming.
Its physical strangeness carried religious weight of its own. Nothing swims in water that is around a third dissolved mineral, a swimmer cannot sink in it, and the haze over it in summer reads as smoke. Barbara Kreiger's history follows how travellers from antiquity to the nineteenth century wrote the sea as a place of judgement first and a curiosity second, and how slowly the second description replaced the first.