You can say that scorched earth techniques are timeless. Absent a broader strategic goal, armies have more or less always went across the land like a swarm of locusts, destroying all in their path - partly out of nature (trampling crops on the march, etc), partly out of the wrath of the soldiery, and partly out of greed.
Scorched earth in the sense of deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure for the fulfillment of war aims goes back to at least the Second Punic War (~210 BCE), in which the Carthaginian general Hannibal destroyed Roman property in Italy as a means of reducing their will and capacity to resist in the long-term (and to induce them to come to terms). Chevauchee in the Hundred Years' War (England and France, 1300s and 1400s AD) was also used in this sense.
Scorched earth in the sense of destruction of one's own infrastructure to slow or damage an enemy is also ancient, though the first example that comes to mind is of Imperial Russian troops destroying crops and housing as Napoleon's army advanced through Russian territory (1812 AD). It's definitely much older than that, I'm just drawing blanks on other examples.
Scorched earth in the modern sense of systemic destruction of economic capacity is usually credited to General Sherman of the US Civil War (1861-1865 AD), if not in origin, at least in popularization. By the utter destruction of the productive and logistical capacity of the Confederacy, he sought to cripple their ability to support their own armies even far from the front he was fighting on. He went so far as to have railroad rails bent around trees so they couldn't be recovered, these being called "Sherman's neckties" because they resembled a necktie around the 'neck' of a tree trunk when so bent. He would later, and more gruesomely, use a similar technique in advocating for the destruction of the buffalo herds of the Western US to starve out Native American tribes.