Olive

The olive, Olea europaea, is one of the founding cultivated trees of the Mediterranean, and its mythology follows its economic weight. In the Greek story Athena and Poseidon contested the patronage of Athens; Poseidon struck the rock and produced a spring or a horse, Athena planted the first olive tree, and the gods judged her gift the more useful, giving her the city. The olive branch as a token of peace is older than any single text and passed into universal use; in the Hebrew Bible the dove returns to Noah's ark with an olive leaf, the sign that the flood has receded and that God is reconciled with the earth.

At the ancient Olympic Games the victor's only prize was a wreath cut from a sacred wild olive tree said to grow beside the temple of Zeus at Olympia, the kotinos, a reward whose deliberate lack of material value was itself the point, glory rather than gain. Some individual olive trees are of extraordinary and partly verified age: the Olive Tree of Vouves on Crete, still bearing fruit today, is estimated by tree-ring and radiocarbon methods at somewhere between two and four thousand years old, a living witness, if the estimate holds, to the same Mediterranean world that first told the story of Athena's gift.

Olive oil carried the tree's sacred role into ritual. It fuelled the lamps of temple and synagogue, and it was the base of the holy anointing oil; the Hebrew mashiach and the Greek christos both mean the anointed one, so that the central title of Judaeo-Christian expectation is, at root, an olive-oil word. The Mount of Olives east of Jerusalem and the garden of Gethsemane, the name means oil-press, frame the last night of the Gospels. Olive trees are famously long-lived, some in Gethsemane and elsewhere credibly many centuries old, which lends the tree an air of continuity and witness that its symbolism of peace, reconciliation and consecration draws on.

The sheer scale of the ancient olive oil trade is visible today in an unlikely monument: Monte Testaccio in Rome is an artificial hill some fifty metres high, built up entirely from the broken shards of an estimated fifty-three million olive oil amphorae discarded there by the Roman state over roughly two and a half centuries, a mountain of literal broken pottery testifying to the sheer volume of oil that once flowed into the ancient capital. Modern olive oil production remains concentrated in the same Mediterranean basin that first cultivated the tree, with Spain, Italy and Greece together producing the great majority of the world's supply even today.