Olives and Oil: The Origins

Some years, Greek Easter falls late in April, and the olive trees on the island of Crete often blossom at the same time, as if to celebrate the festival of rebirth, their branches clustered with tiny white blooms so small you might miss them entirely if you didn’t know where to look. At that time of year, an elusive magic in the island’s light makes it possible, despite the intrusive clamor of modern tourism, to catch a glimpse of what it must have been like in ancient days, when Crete was the dynamic heartland of the Mediterranean, the birthplace of the oldest proto-European civilization. We call the people who lived here then, from roughly the middle of the third millennium to the late second millennium BCE, Minoan. What they actually called themselves is not known. Minoan is a modern name, given them by Sir Arthur Evans, the British archeologist who excavated one of their grandest sites, at Knossos just south of the modern city of Irakleion.[1] Knossos and similar “palaces” on the island represent some of the most complete remains of what would eventually evolve into Mediterranean culture. And here on this island we find some of the earliest references to olives and their oil.

Nothing speaks of the Mediterranean quite like the olive. The tree, the fruit, the oil are all embedded in the history and mythology of the region as much as in the landscape—and in the food. Wherever you go throughout this splendid part of the world you come across olive trees of all shapes and descriptions: It could be an ancient survivor like the Sardinian tree called Ozzastru (see Chapter 1), or a single half-wild tree clinging to a Syrian hillside, its old trunk gnarled and twisted with time, its sparse, dusty foliage shivering in a dry breeze; or it could equally well be a vast Andalusian orchard of pristinely planted modern trees marching to the horizon, row upon row, until the mind grows dizzy with the prospect. The lands that border this inland sea are varied, from deserts to rocky slopes to river deltas and upland plains, but wherever you travel, the olive tree flourishes, having evolved precisely in this Mediterranean climate of hot, dry summers and cool, rainy winters, a climate that is perfect for the health and vigor of these trees.

So it’s not surprising if nothing speaks of Mediterranean culture and cuisine quite like olive oil. Since ancient times it has been food, unguent, balm for the sick, and source of light, as well as the victor’s prize in the pan-Hellenic athletic events that so impassioned the Greek world. The three great Mediterranean religions all recognize this—it’s no accident that olive oil provides the chrism for Christian baptism and anointing the dying; that the miracle celebrated at Hanukkah commemorates the supply of olive oil to light the temple lamps; or that a surah from the Koran praises it: “A sacred tree, the olive,” the Prophet says, “which has an oil so clear that it would give light even if no spark were put to it.”

It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of olives and their oil for the countries and cultures that surround the Inner Sea. The tree itself is the fullest expression, the icon, of Mediterranean civilization, and its fruits and the fragrant oil made from them are the foundations of the Mediterranean diet—or, rather, the Mediterranean way of eating. For millennia the olive tree grew only in the Mediterranean basin. In the rest of the world, it was unknown until modern times, with the realization that what climatologists call a Mediterranean climate, a particular and specific type of subtropical environment in which olives flourish, exists in other parts of the world as well. And only very recently, in the past couple of decades, has olive cultivation expanded in California, Australia, South Africa, and elsewhere. Still, today, more than 95 percent of world production of olive oil comes from the countries of the Mediterranean, principally Spain, Italy, and Greece. And all around the Inner Sea, olive trees continue to define the landscape, just as olive oil defines the Mediterranean kitchen, as it has done for incalculable generations.

Olives and olive oil still play an essential role in the economy of the island of Crete. With more than 30 million olive trees, Crete produces a full one-third of Greece’s considerable annual yield of extra-virgin oil. It was no less important some 4,000 years ago. Archeologists find evidence of Bronze Age traders from Crete all over the eastern Mediterranean, in mainland Greece, Cyprus, Anatolia, the Levant, Egypt, and elsewhere. Inscriptions, Egyptian wall paintings, and the residue of destroyed cities and tombs (shards of Minoan and Mycenaean pottery, carved and engraved objects, characteristic weapons and tools) all speak to this Cretan presence. And not surprisingly, since trade is a two-way flow, back on Crete itself there are equivalent traces of Greek, Egyptian, Levantine, and other historic and prehistoric cultures.

The ships in these Bronze Age merchant fleets also carried wine and grain, but oil was a major cargo, exchanged for metals (tin, copper, even gold and silver) and other rare and precious materials. Later, as Greeks and Phoenicians began to branch out, to explore and colonize the western Mediterranean, they took with them the shoots of young olive trees for planting in their new homes at Carthage, Marseilles, and other ports of call across the sea, spreading the culture of olives wherever they went. But because these infant trees took a notably long time to bear fruit and because olive oil was a staple in the diet of both Phoenicians and Greeks, they also welcomed regular shipments of oil from their mother cities.

Back on the island of Crete, it seems clear that agriculture flourished even in Minoan times. Regulated by the governing palaces, it provided plenty of what could already be considered a Mediterranean triad—grapes for wine, grain (wheat but also barley) for bread and porridge, and olives for precious oil. An abundant supply meant that in most years surplus commodities, especially easily transportable wine and oil, could be shipped to less fortunate cultures and lands. Knossos was just one among many sites on the island, although it may have been the most important. In the west wing of the Knossos palace, Evans uncovered some 150 intact giant pithoi, or storage jars. In all, there may have been more than 400 jars, each of which may have contained as much as 1,000 liters of oil—or wine or grain.

Many more pithoi were found at other sites, and not just on Crete. The island of Cyprus also had production centers for commodity exports. At Pyrgos-Mavroraki, in the northwest corner of the island, Italian archeologists discovered the remains of an oil mill from the early second millennium, 4,000 or so years ago, along with storage jars similar to those at Knossos. Each jar, they estimated, might hold as much as 500 kilos (1,100 pounds) of grain or liquid (olive oil or wine)—an impressive capacity, far beyond the needs of the local population, and convincing evidence of the importance of such goods in a redistributive Bronze Age economy.

It’s clear that olive oil was a major part of that economy, a commodity in great demand. But for what purpose? For food, for light, for cleansing and perfuming the body—these are the standard answers, but we can’t ever be certain and, as usual, scholars differ mightily in their interpretations. Some have even argued that olive oil was not intended for food at all. Instead, they say, oil was used primarily to fill the little terra-cotta and carved-stone lamps that provided a spark of light on dark days and that are found in profusion in archeological sites from the Early Bronze Age practically down to the present day. Oil also filled more grandiose and ornate lanterns and candelabra that lit the homes of gods and goddesses—and presumably of rulers and dignitaries as well. One such, the pride of the Etruscan museum in Cortona, my Tuscan hometown, is still to be seen there, a great bronze lampadario, elaborately crafted with mythological figures and a circle of 16 lamps that once flickered in the tenebrous depths of an Etruscan shrine.

Some historians of the ancient world, however, think that olive oil’s primary use was as a fragrance. There’s plenty of evidence, on Crete and elsewhere, of the economic importance of the perfume industry, which created a high-status, value-added product by infusing the basic substance with a gamut of natural aromas from leaves, blossoms, roots, resins, and berries—roses and lilies, lavender, laurel, orris root, cinnamon, juniper, coriander, mastic resin from the island of Chios, and peppery bergamot (think Earl Grey tea), a musky citrus native to southern Italy. Imagine the heady fragrance of an ancient city—the pungent odors of unwashed bodies, sweat, human sewage, animals and their dung, smoking piles of garbage—and you quickly understand why aromatic oils were a necessity. They conveyed both pleasure and prestige, while the industry that grew up to produce them made the fortunes of many ancient cities. Pyrgos-Mavroraki, the Cyprus site, was destroyed by earthquake some 4,000 years ago. Just recently, in addition to the oil mill, the Italian archeological team uncovered substantial workshops where “perfumes must have been produced on an industrial scale,” according to the lead archeologist, Maria Rosa Belgiorno.[2] Not surprisingly, Aphrodite, the sweetly perfumed goddess of love (her skirts were said to waft odors of cinnamon and roses), came from Cyprus, and it was to Cyprus she repaired when, overcome with love for Anchises (father of Aeneas, the Trojan refugee who, myth says, eventually founded Rome), she prepared herself to seduce him: “[T]he Graces bathed her with heavenly oil such as blooms upon the bodies of the eternal gods—oil divinely sweet . . . filled with fragrance.”[3] Archeologist Belgiorno concludes that essences like these were probably used daily, even in the most modest homes.[4]

Olive oil was also used for cleansing the body—in classical Greece, athletes rubbed themselves with oil after their strenuous contests, then used a sort of crescent-shaped blade with a dull edge, called a strigil, to scrape the oil, dirt, and sweat from their bodies. (Try it sometime—it actually works, especially after a sweat bath or sauna, and will leave your skin feeling clean, soft, and supple.)

But aromatic oils had functions beyond mere personal adornment. Throughout human history, they have also been used, and are used still today, to signify consecration, whether of priests or of royalty, of the living or of the dead. Sweet-smelling Aphrodite, again, anointed dead Hector’s body with rose-scented oil to prevent it from defilement, and in Egypt, perfumed oils were used to prepare mummies for the tomb. In modern Christian ritual, babies are still christened with fragrant holy oil, and the same is used to give extreme unction to the dying, while priests receive the chrism of oil when they are ordained. The very title “Christ” comes from the Greek Xristos, meaning the one who is anointed (as does “Messiah,” from Hebrew).

Only an olive oil of the highest quality would do to make perfume for Aphrodite—an oil, that is, whose fragrance would complement but not overwhelm the aromatics steeped in it. The best oil for the purpose, according to Theoprastus, a fourth-century BCE botanist and close associate of Aristotle, should be pressed from raw, unripe olives. Truly there is nothing new under the sun—even today, olive oil connoisseurs know that the finest olive oil is made from olives that are not fully mature and that are pressed without the application of heat—cold-pressed is the term modern food writers use, somewhat inexactly.

What, then, about olive oil as food? It’s all too easy to be dismissive of oil’s importance in ancient diets until you apply a dash of common sense to the question. Human history in its essence is about guaranteeing the food supply, but archeologists in the past paid little attention to what people ate and how they grew and processed it, ignoring the fundamental nature of diet. In part this was an argument in absentia: Except for animal bones and occasional carbonized seed remains, there’s precious little evidence of food left in ancient sites. But modern methods, such as isotope analysis of ancient bones or simple flotation techniques using water to gently process soil from excavations, revealing seeds, roots, microscopic grains of pollen, carbonized remains of food, and other evidence, are helping to bring more information to the fore. Still, beyond the commodities exchanged in international trade and described in long lists of palace stores, we know very little about what people actually ate. It seems impossible, however, that anything as nutritious, as fundamental in the economy, and as easy to produce even by primitive methods as olive oil would not be significant, as much so in the ancient diet as it is in the kitchens and on the tables of modern cooks all across the Mediterranean.

Everything we know about Bronze Age nutrition—and we don’t actually know much—leads to the conclusion that most of the people most of the time lived on bread or grain porridge, wine, legumes, and mostly foraged wild greens, with precious little meat except on major feast days when meat offerings were made on altars. Bread, wine, legumes, and vegetables are notably deficient in fat, and fat is essential to human metabolism. Hard as it may be to believe in our own time of fat-free this and low-fat that, we actually must consume fat in order to metabolize certain vitamins and to develop vital membranes in our bodies. Without fat, we are, quite simply, malnourished.

So where did our Bronze Age Mediterranean ancestors get the fat they needed? Not from meat, because they didn’t actually have a lot of meat. And not from fish, because fish, apart from inshore species, were difficult to catch and, once caught, hard to preserve for a table more than a few kilometers distant from the sea.[5] It almost goes without saying, then, that a lot of the necessary fat in ancient Mediterranean diets must have come from olives and olive oil. Modern Greeks are world champion olive oil consumers, drizzling an average of 50 kilos of olive oil per person annually over, in, and around their food. In ancient times, archeologist and ethnohistorian Lin Foxhall has estimated, per person consumption for food (lighting and bathing were calculated separately) was somewhat lower—not more than 35 kilos per person.[6] Foxhall is speaking of wealthy Athenian households in the classical period. Still, if I’m doing my math right, at the upper estimate that’s 860 calories per person per day from olive oil—or at least 30 percent of total daily intake.

If we don’t know much about the diet of Bronze Age Greeks, things get a little clearer as we move along in history. By the fourth century BCE, Greek colonists had spread out from the mother country, establishing city states across much of the Mediterranean. Of course they brought their beloved olive trees with them, whether to Sicily or southern Italy or farther afield. One such overseas Greek was Archestratus, a gastronome, an early foodie if you will, who lived a life of luxe, calme, et volupté back in the fourth century BCE in the Greek city of Gela, on the southern Sicilian coast. He traveled widely throughout the Greek world and wrote exhaustively about the foods and dishes he discovered—and in which he clearly delighted. His long poem, which was titled possibly Gastronomia or perhaps Hedypatheia, meaning “The Life of Luxury” (or as James Davidson translates it, “Dinnerology”[7]), has been lost. All that we know of Archestratus’s writings are fragments preserved, somewhat like quotations, within a later work called Deipnosophistai, or “Philosophers at the Dinner Table.” This was written a good 500 years after Archestratus by another Greek, Athenaeus, who lived in the Egyptian Delta town of Naucratis.

Archestratus, food historians like to say, is the first real cookbook writer, or at least the first real Mediterranean cookbook writer.[8] The importance of olive oil in the classical kitchen is unmistakable from the recipes and presentations, abbreviated though they are, that are preserved within the Deipnosophistai. Food historians Andrew Dalby and Sally Grainger compiled The Classical Cookbook with Dalby’s translations and Grainger’s adaptations of classical recipes for modern cooks, beginning with those of Archestratus. Lots of these “recipes” or table notes are for fish, a luxury that was prized on the banquet tables of the Athenian upper classes, and most of them call for cooking in olive oil or dressing with olive oil before sending the dish to the table. Modern chefs would do well to pay heed to the simplicity of Archestratus’s instructions; far more attention must be paid, he says, to the quality of what Italian cooks still call the materia prima, the fundamental ingredients, than to the manner of preparation. Probably best known are his instructions for tuna, but not just any tuna: a large female tuna . . . “whose mother-city is Byzantium.” This was to be sliced, roasted, sprinkled with salt, and finally garnished with olive oil. “But if you serve it sprinkled with vinegar,” Archestratus councils, “it is ruined.”[9]

And maybe Archestratus wasn’t actually history’s first food writer after all, for we have a very few fragments, also in the Deipnosophistai, from an even earlier author, Mithaecus by name, also a Sicilian Greek, whose recipes are even more admirable for their brevity: “Cut off the head of the ribbon fish. Wash it and cut into slices. Pour cheese and oil over it.”

Olives and their oil continued to grow in importance throughout the classical period. By the time the Romans controlled much of the known world, from Hadrian’s Wall to the second cataract of the Nile, from the Caspian Sea to the Atlantic coast of Morocco, trade in olive oil was one of the engines that drove the empire. In the late second century CE, oil was added to the annona, the annual grain allotment to which at least one-third of Roman citizens were entitled. The need for grain and oil, for both the annona urbis to supply the lower classes, called the plebs frumentaria, and the annona militaris to furnish the army, created a dangerously self-perpetuating demand that successive Roman governments struggled increasingly to fulfill. More land had to be sought and conquered to produce the grain and oil, larger armies charged with controlling the land had to be supplied, and meanwhile the Roman populace grew ever more voracious and the state ever more burdened. (Soon pork and wine were added to the annona urbis on top of oil, grain, and salt.)

In Rome you can still see, even today, the most telling evidence of this insatiable demand and its consequences. Walk down the left bank of the Tiber, along the Lungotevere Aventino, until you come to the Lungotevere Testaccio, which borders Rome’s old slaughterhouse neighborhood, the site until 1975 of the central abattoir or mattatoio; then duck up a side street away from the river, past the remaining mattatoio buildings, many of which are now converted into art galleries. You will come to a curious, large, terraced knoll that is unmistakably a relic of some sort. And indeed, this mound, this hill, Monte Testaccio, 35 meters (115 feet or about six stories) high with another 15 meters below the level of the modern street, almost a kilometer in circumference, is composed of the broken shards of what archeologists have estimated to be a cool 53 million amphorae.[10] Most of them were made along the banks of the Guadalquivir River in far-off Andalusia, then a Roman colony called Baetica, whence they were shipped to Rome. Archeologists estimate the total represented 6 billion liters of Andalusian olive oil, not all of which came at once, of course. Monte Testaccio probably represents the accumulation of a couple of centuries of olive oil imports, culminating in the late second century. But any way you look at it, it’s a powerful amount of oil—and a powerful testimony to the consumption habits of imperial Rome. If Foxhall is correct in her estimation of oil consumption in Greece of 35 kilos annually per person, that would be oil sufficient to furnish 171 million people over the years. Impressive!

Modern Spanish oil producers have complained for years that much of the oil in Italian bottles actually comes from Spain, but the remains at Monte Testaccio suggest that this is a very old story. Whether the oil was good or not is anyone’s guess. It risked all manner of mishaps during its long transit from the farm where it was produced to the shores of the Guadalquivir, then by barge down the river to Seville (Hispalis, the Romans called the city) and by sailing ship or rowing galley around through the Gates of Hercules, up past the south coast of Sardinia and into the mouth of the Tiber at Ostia, to end up on the river banks in Rome. Actually, about its quality, I really don’t have to guess at all: The oil must have been pretty damaged by the time it reached its destination. Nonetheless, Spanish oil was in great demand, much as it is to this day, in the cheaper end of the market.

And even in ancient times, dealers in olive oil were sensitive to charges of fraud, especially with oil coming from such a great distance. The shards piled up at Monte Testaccio are concrete evidence of their caution. Most of the amphorae were labeled with inscriptions, tituli picti they’re called, painted or stamped on the outside, recording the weight of the empty amphora, then the weight of the oil that filled it and its provenance, along with the name of the person who actually weighed it and recorded it. Traceability was a forceful concept even in antiquity.

Meanwhile, oil from other regions was also bought, sold, and distributed in the ancient economy, and not just to Rome, although Rome, with its obligations to feed a voracious population as well as a burgeoning army, was the dominant market for oil, grain, and other staples.

North Africa, from the Nile to the Atlantic, was a vast Roman colony devoted to supplying the imperial mother ship. Leptis Magna, on the Mediterranean coast of modern Libya, is but one example. This opulent city—the ruins of Roman Leptis are among the most impressive in the entire Mediterranean—was one of the largest North African centers for olive oil. Leptis Magna needed oil to supply the annual tribute that Julius Caesar had imposed on its citizens, who had backed the wrong side in his Civil War. An astounding three million pounds (more than a million liters) of oil was shipped to Rome annually in a “tax” that lasted until the reign of Constantine in the fourth century CE. In the Gebel Tarhuna, the high plateau south of Leptis and north of the pre-Sahara, a full-scale oil industry, with thousands of trees and hundreds of mills, plus potteries that turned out amphorae to contain the oil (and possibly, an archeologist of the region suggests, also wine), had developed to supply this demand.[11]

Other parts of North Africa also provided impressive supplies, while Italy itself continued to produce quantities of oil, not all of it premium by any means. Horace, the great Roman satirist of the late first century BCE, described the oil produced by his neighbor Ofellus: “You’d detest the smell of his olive oil,” he wrote, “yet even on birthdays or weddings or other occasions, in a clean toga, he drips it on the salad from a two-pint horn with his own hands.”[12] Indisputably, most of the oil in antiquity was much worse than even the most ordinary oil that is available today. Milling procedures were primitive, and, despite what almost all the Latin agronomists recommended, little effort was made to produce oil cleanly and rapidly from sound olives at an early stage of maturity, so that it is no wonder the result was rancid, fusty, musty—all the characteristics that are overwhelmingly rejected by the best modern oil producers.

Still, some oils were more highly prized than the ordinary Spanish and North African oils, or even Italian home production, like that of Horace’s neighbor. Presumably better oils commanded higher prices from connoisseurs, as they do today. Venafrum oil, from the hill country where modern Molise, Abruzzo, Lazio, and Campania come together, was “of the very highest renown,” according to Pliny the Elder. Yet another lauded oil came from Liburnia, an Adriatic territory roughly corresponding to modern Istria in Croatia. Both these regions still produce notable oil. And ancient cooks also had a way, as we learn from Apicius, the Roman gastronome who came along much later, to correct Spanish oil and make it seem like high-quality Liburnian: Take elecampane (Inula helenium L., an herb used in the modern production of absinthe), along with Cyprian rush (Cyperus esculentus, earth or tiger nuts) and green bay leaves that are not too old, he advised, and crush them together to reduce to a fine powder. Sift this into your Spanish oil, add finely ground roasted salt, and stir industriously for three days or more. Then leave to settle. “Everybody will take this for Liburnian oil,” Apicius concludes. (Compare this to the instructions for improving oil in my old Spanish cookbook; see Chapter 1.) Another way to correct oil was by steeping herbs or flowers in it, or if not correct, at least disguise the flavor of bad oil, much as “Persian lime” or “sun-dried tomato” or “genuine essence of white truffles” can almost—but not quite—disguise the flavor of indifferent oils today. The chronicles of olive oil prove yet again that such trickery and deception have a long, if undistinguished, history. Unscrupulous oil producers in Italy and Spain (and elsewhere, I’m sure) still try to persuade a gullible public that the oil in those bottles is truly extra-virgin and truly high quality, even when it’s demonstrably not.

On the whole, however, Italians in classical times seem to have been more careful than Greeks about the quality of their olives, more conscientious about harvesting and pressing, and consequently more cognizant of the quality of their oil. Greeks, as shown in a well-known black-figure vase from the sixth century BCE, now in the British Museum, knocked the olives out of the trees with long poles, then picked them up from the ground. And many modern Greeks harvest olives by this method to this very day.

Roman agronomists, and they were many, from Cato to Varro to Columella, advised that olives must be harvested by hand to produce the best oil. “You should pick by hand rather than beat from the tree,” Cato instructed, “and in picking by hand it is better to do so with the bare fingers rather than with a tool because the texture of a tool not only injures the berry but barks the branches and leaves them exposed to the frost.” Green oil (viride in Latin), made in late October from olives that were still green or just starting to ripen and turn color, was the finest, Roman agricultural writers cautioned. Greeks preferred the lush flavors of oil made in December or even into January, when the olives were fully ripe and black. Interestingly, these preferences persist to this day in much of Greece and Italy, with Greeks appreciating sweeter, fruitier oils, while Italians, especially in the north, still look for bitter, pungent flavors from less mature olives.

Columella, one of the greatest of these ancient agronomists and the one who has come down to us with his work most intact, called the olive “first among trees,” evidence of the honor and respect with which those ancient Romans valued the olive.

Olives in their natural state, freshly picked, are almost unbearably bitter and acrid.[13] Anyone who’s ever popped an olive, green or black, ripe or not, direct from the tree into her mouth will tell you that this is no way to pleasure your taste buds. Indeed, the flavor and texture of a raw, uncured olive is disgusting, pure and simple, so acerbic that it puckers the mouth, with a bitterness that lingers for hours afterward. What causes that are glucosides in the olives, particularly the compound called oleoeuropein; interestingly, they are the same properties that account for the salutary benefits of olive oil. It was a daring innovator who first discovered the delights hidden behind that unappealing taste. And who was that? Who dared go beyond the repugnant flavor of a fresh olive? Who was the first person to realize that the caustic fruits could be cured to something delicious and that, moreover, when pressed, they yielded a savory, sweet, and nutritious oil that had so many uses—balm for the skin, light for lamps, an essential ingredient on the table?

It seems obvious, when you stop to think, that oil must have come first, long before it was understood that olives, properly cured, could be eaten. Olives that drop from the trees in their overripe state leave oily blotches where they fall, as anyone who has ever trod the streets of Berkeley, California, in late October and November will attest, and the oil eventually oozes out. It won’t be very good oil, at least not by today’s standards, but it will be oil nonetheless, without the bitter harshness of fresh olives, a useful item in the kitchen for cooking and for adding nourishment to food. I’m guessing that the earliest use of the wild olives that flourished in many parts of the Mediterranean was simply for the oil they exuded, and only later some brave soul discovered that there were ways to extract the nastiness and produce . . . mmm, something indescribably delicious, a salted or brine-cured olive (see Chapter 7 for suggestions for curing raw olives). Once its innate bitterness was tamed or eliminated altogether, the natural sweetness of the fruit came forth.

Wild olives were apparently growing throughout the Mediterranean basin even tens of thousands of years ago. This is the kind of climate an olive tree loves: long, hot, dry summers with clear days and sunny skies, followed by cool, rainy winters when snow falls but rarely and almost never at sea level, and there is seldom penetrating frost except on the mountaintops. Fossilized leaves of wild olive trees have been found on some Aegean islands from 35,000 years ago, possibly long before any humans were around to talk about it, and not only leaves but also the fossilized larvae of the olive fly, still to this day a pest for olive farmers. But it is quite a lot later, perhaps around 4500 BCE, and a little farther to the east, in the northern Jordan valley and on the slopes of Mount Carmel in modern Israel and Palestine, that we begin to find clues to early, very primitive olive processing. Neolithic farmers in these parts made oil with rudimentary methods, simply crushing olives with a stone in a basin (just as they crushed grains), then flooding the crushed olives with water so that the oil would float to the top.

Whether they were wild or domesticated olives the Neolithic farmers crushed is not clear. Wild olives flourished throughout the Mediterranean, but they are hard to distinguish from domesticated ones since cultivated olives, if neglected for a time and left unpruned, will revert to a feral state. Tramping the hillsides around our farm in eastern Tuscany, we often come upon ancient olives: long abandoned and left unpruned, they bristle like a witch’s tree with shoots and water spouts and suckers that spring up from the base. On the island of Pantelleria, way out in the middle of the Mediterranean between Sicily and Tunisia, I came across a whole grove of what I was told were wild trees, although I suspect from the regular pattern in which they were growing that they were actually feral olives. Stunted, windswept, and impenetrably thick with growth, they may have been the island’s characteristic Biancolilla variety. Each bush had just a few olives and they were almost bluish in color but still hard as little pebbles in late July. This habit of reverting to the wild is why archeologists have a devil of a job figuring out when and where olive trees were first domesticated. Even with modern technology, it is hard to distinguish between the carbonized pits of true wild olives and those of domesticates, or between wild and feral olives. Wild olives are small and difficult to harvest amid the tree’s thorny branches, and they are less productive, with an extremely bitter oil compared to cultivated olives. Some people actually treasure wild olives for that very bitterness. Near Kritsá, a village at the eastern end of Crete that is renowned for its production of excellent olive oil, a wild olive tree was pointed out to me, growing on a hillside next to the bleached stones of an ancient gate to the ruins of Bronze Age Kreta Lato. “Does anyone ever harvest that tree?” I asked the young enthusiast who was showing me around. “Oh yes,” he said. “Old people do. Old people mix it with oil from the regular trees. They say it adds flavor.” Old people often know a lot more than young people do—about olives and olive oil if not necessarily about cell phones and Facebook pages. So these old Cretans mix wild olives into their harvest for the flavor—and they probably get a huge input of health benefits too from wild oil’s high content of bitter polyphenols.

Jump ahead several thousand years: The last Minoan olive farmers have long since disappeared from the island of Crete, and now we’re in the seventh century BCE at a Palestinian/Philistine site (now in Israel) called Ekron. A leading city in ancient Philistia, one of the five cities of the Philistine pentapolis mentioned in the Bible, Ekron was an amazing producer and exporter of olive oil—at least 500 tons of oil annually, making it the largest oil production center discovered so far in the ancient world. More than a hundred large oil presses have been detailed at the site, although only a few have been excavated. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs has a good description[14] of how Ekron’s factories (at this scale, that’s exactly what they were) produced oil, first crushing the olives with a cylindrical stone that was rolled back and forth in a large rectangular stone basin. On either side of the basin stood presses. The crushed olives were transferred to fiber baskets that were placed in the presses, one basket atop the other, on wooden slats that covered the stone vats in which the oil was received. A heavy wooden beam pressed down on the stack of baskets. One end of the beam was inserted into a niche in the wall, while the other hung free but with heavy stone weights suspended by ropes to add pressure to the stack. The oil produced from the pressing flowed into the vat and from there was transferred to jars, where it was allowed to separate from its watery residues. This is exactly the system, according to Italian archeologists, that had operated at Pyrgos-Mavroraki on Cyprus 1,300 years earlier.

It’s also very similar to, although a bit more primitive than, the system that was used in oil mills near Leptis Magna and at Volubilis, modern Walili, at the other end of the Mediterranean, in Morocco, when the Roman colony, or the Berbers who were the Romans’ subjects, produced prodigious quantities of olive oil for the markets of the mother country in the early first century CE. By this time, however, there had been a major evolution. From excavation reports and drawings, it appears that in earlier mills, such as Ekron, cylindrical stones were rolled back and forth in rectangular basins to crush the olives to an oily paste. At some point in the history of technology, probably by the third century BCE, this cumbersome structure was replaced by a circular basin with an upright circular stone, like a mill wheel or disk set vertically, rather than horizontally as it would be for grinding grain. The wheel was turned around the basin by means of a long shaft piercing the center of the stone. This is precisely the system that was still in use during the lifetimes of some of my very old acquaintances, Italians, Greeks, Spanish, and others from traditional parts of the olive oil world. On a Tunisian desert oasis, I saw just such a mill in which the motive force came from a blindfolded camel that plodded patiently round and round the basin, grinding the olives to a paste. It was also the system used on an old-fashioned farm in southern Tuscany, which you might think of as one of the most advanced places in Italy, where in the early years of the present century, a small horse still patiently turned the crushing stone and workers spooned the oil from the top of the vats with metal scoops, leaving the murky residue, the morchia, behind. (That residue, by the way, is useful. Smeared over the outside rinds of whole rounds of pecorino cheese, it protects and preserves them during the aging process.) The baronessa who owned the mill insisted that this was the only way to get the finest oil. She died only recently at the age of 100, so perhaps she knew what she was talking about.

But the process has always been that simple: crush, press, strain, or separate. It’s the way olive oil has been made down through the millennia. The major change that takes place from time to time is the energy source, from humans (often slaves) to animals (mules, horses, camels) to steam to electricity—but the system itself has remained much the same. Is there any other human technology that has changed so little over four or five millennia? I can’t think of one. Today, with our continuous-cycle, two-phase, stainless-steel mills that operate cleanly and rapidly to produce very high quality olive oil, the system is the same: crush, extract, separate, and strain or filter. The hammer mill crushes the olives; the malaxer, or gramola, a long box of a kneading machine that is essential to the quality of the oil, helps pull the molecules of oil together; and the separator operates like a centrifuge, spinning out the oil rather than skimming it off the top, but in essence a Bronze Age oil producer, perhaps a little dazed by the scope of the operation, would still be right at home in a modern Tuscan frantoio.

1. Minoans from the legendary King Minos, ruler of Crete, who kept the fearful Minotaur at the heart of his labyrinth and fed it an annual tribute of Athenian youths and maidens.

2. The excavation reports also make a strong argument for the use of olive oil in the furnaces for smelting copper, another valuable Cypriot export.

3. Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, trans. by H. G. Evelyn-White. http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hesiod/white/complete.html#chapter3.5, cited on blogs.getty.edu.

4. Cinyra, Cyprus and the notes of music, of wine and perfumes. http://www.erimiwine.net/erimiwine_g000002.pdf.

5. Except for tuna, which from early times was caught on its annual migrations; the fish was valued precisely because its flesh could be salted and preserved. For this reason, tuna was sometimes called “the pig of the sea.”

6. In Olive Cultivation in Ancient Greece: Seeking the Ancient Economy, Oxford University Press, 2007.

7. Davidson, James, Courtesans and Fishcakes, New York, 1999.

8. The Li Chi, a Chinese text that included many recipes, was almost contemporary, but of course there was no connection between the Mediterranean and China.

9. Fr. 38 = Athen. Deipn. 7.303e, quoted by Daniel Levine in http://www.uark.edu/campus-resources/dlevine/AIWFLecture.html. See also Dalby & Grainger, The Classical Cookbook.

10. Other estimates run from 25 to 35 million. But most sources agree with the figure of 53 million.

11. Rural Settlement and Economic Activity: Olive Oil and Amphorae Production on the Tarhuna Plateau during the Roman Period. Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
at the University of Leicester by Mftah A. M. Ahmed (DoA Tripoli, Libya), School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester, March 2010. The author points out that this quantity of olive oil could not have sprung up overnight but must have been in development for at least the previous century if not longer, possibly going back to when Leptis Magna was founded by Phoenicians in the eighth or ninth century BCE.

12. Horace, Book II, Satire II: 53-69.

13. This is not universally true. In the Italian region of Puglia, and possibly in other places as well, there is a type of black olive that, when harvested fresh from the tree and immediately cooked in plenty of olive oil, is utterly delicious, sweet, and lush, especially when sopped up with crusts of bread. It’s a great feature on farmhouse tables and in many restaurants—Antichi Sapori in the farmland outside Andria is a great place to sample this local delicacy.

14. http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/History/Early%20History%20-%20Archaeology/Ekron%20-%20A%20Philistine%20City.

15. Saraceno, Saracen, is an old term for Arab Muslims, still widely used in Italy, especially in the South.