Oil, Anointing, and the Mount of Olives

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.