It’s extremely rare that we don’t reach for a bottle of olive oil whilst we’re cooking – if we’re not sweating or frying things in it, we’re making a dressing, a mayonnaise, splashing a glug into bread and pasta dough or greasing the inside of a tin. Olive oil has become a ubiquitous staple in our kitchens, but how did that come to be? You can make oil from all sorts of different things – vegetables, sunflower seeds, rapeseeds – so why are we so obsessed with oil taken from olives, specifically? The answer to that question lies in antiquity, among the pages of ancient historical texts and archaeological findings.
The cultivation of olive trees is one of the earliest signs we have of civilisation in Europe and Asia; in fact, olive growing actually predates any form of written language by at least a thousand years. Though olive oil is a cornerstone of European cookery today, the olive tree (Olea Europaea) has its roots far away from Europe, in ancient Mesopotamia.
Archaeologists in Galilee discovered traces of olive oil in a pot that dates back to 6000BC. Modern-day Syria is widely considered to be the birthplace of the wild olive tree and provides some of the earliest evidence for the pressing of olive oil; clay tablets from the old Kingdom of Ebla (discovered near Aleppo) reveal that the production of olive oil was a major industry in the area around 3000BC, and suggests that the ownership of olive trees was a significant status symbol.
Visit Syria today and you’ll see dense forests of olive trees carpeting the more verdant parts of the country, particularly the north. Over time, olive trees made their way around the Mediterranean, largely via seafaring traders. By 3000BC, olives had reached Crete and had already become a highly prized commodity – indeed, some speculate that olives contributed to the vast wealth of the Minoan civilisation around this time.