A Short History of the Olive Oil Trade
Olive oil has been one of the Mediterranean’s most valuable traded goods for well over four thousand years, moving out of the eastern Mediterranean in the Bronze Age and later flowing across the whole Roman world in clay amphorae by the shipload. What began as a local household staple in the Levant and the Aegean grew, over centuries, into a genuine long-distance industry with named production regions, standardised jars, tax records and busy sea routes. The story is not one country’s alone: the olive and its oil were carried, planted and prized by many peoples around the Mediterranean rim, and the trade belongs to all of them.
What follows is a plain-spoken tour through that history, from the first sealed jars of the Bronze Age to the age of amphorae and Roman commerce, with an honest note on what we know and what we are still guessing at.
From Bronze Age jars to Greek and Phoenician sails
The domestication of the olive is usually placed somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean, roughly six thousand years ago, though the wild olive grew across a much wider arc and pinning down a single birthplace is genuinely difficult. By the Bronze Age, oil was clearly being made and moved in quantity. In the palaces of Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece, clay tablets written in Linear B record oil as a stored, counted commodity, handed out as rations and offerings and held in great storerooms of stacked jars. Oil at this stage was not only food. It was fuel for lamps, a base for perfumes and unguents, a cosmetic and a ritual substance.
As Iron Age trade revived, the Phoenicians and then the Greeks became the great carriers. Sailing out from the Levantine coast and the Aegean, they set up colonies and trading posts across the Mediterranean and took the olive with them. Greek settlers planted groves in southern Italy and Sicily, along the coasts of what is now France and Spain, and around the Black Sea. Oil travelled in transport amphorae, the tall two-handled clay jars whose shapes archaeologists can often trace back to a particular region. A distinctive Athenian custom underlines how prized the oil was: winners at the Panathenaic games were awarded large decorated amphorae filled with oil from the city’s sacred groves, a prize you could quite literally take to market.
Rome, amphorae and a Mediterranean-wide industry
Under Rome the olive oil trade reached a scale not matched again for centuries. Oil was a daily necessity for cooking, lamplight, bathing, medicine and cleaning the skin, and feeding the vast population of the city of Rome demanded enormous, steady supply. Two provinces stand out as the workhorses of that supply: Hispania Baetica, roughly modern Andalusia in southern Spain, and the province of Africa Proconsularis, in what is now Tunisia and its surroundings. Their oil was shipped north in sturdy globular amphorae, and the empire built the ports, warehouses and shipping to keep it moving.
The most vivid monument to this trade is Monte Testaccio in Rome, an artificial hill made almost entirely of smashed oil amphorae, mostly the Baetican Dressel 20 type. It is often estimated to contain the remains of tens of millions of jars, discarded over roughly two and a half centuries. Because Roman traders painted and stamped their amphorae with details of origin, weight and merchant, these broken sherds have become one of the richest archives of ancient commerce we possess. If you want to understand how the fruit itself was handled before pressing, our olive curing guide covers the table-olive side of the same ancient craft.
A quick, honest word on the numbers below: ancient dates are approximate and much debated, and the figures are widely accepted ranges rather than precise measurements. Treat the timeline as a map of the terrain, not a survey to the centimetre.
| Period (approximate) | What was happening in the oil trade | Key evidence |
|---|---|---|
| c. 4000 BCE onward | Olive domesticated in the eastern Mediterranean; oil used locally for food, light and ritual | Ancient press installations, storage jars |
| c. 1600–1100 BCE | Palace economies of Crete and Mycenae store and ration oil at scale | Linear B tablets, palace storerooms |
| c. 900–500 BCE | Phoenicians and Greeks spread groves and ship oil in amphorae across the sea | Shipwrecks, colonial groves, Panathenaic prize jars |
| c. 100 BCE–250 CE | Roman trade peaks; Spain (Baetica) and North Africa supply the empire | Monte Testaccio, Dressel 20 amphorae, painted stamps |
| c. 400–1400 CE | Trade fragments after Rome, then revives around Byzantine and Islamic Mediterranean networks | Byzantine records, medieval port archives |
| c. 1500 CE onward | Olive carried to the New World; regional export trades grow toward the modern industry | Colonial plantings, port and customs ledgers |
After Rome’s western collapse the long-distance trade thinned but never vanished. Oil kept moving through Byzantine networks and, from the seventh century, across the expanding Islamic Mediterranean, where olive cultivation and oil pressing remained central to agriculture and cuisine. Medieval Italian maritime cities and Iberian producers gradually rebuilt export trades, and when European powers reached the Americas they carried olive cuttings with them, planting the first New World groves in places such as Peru, Mexico and later California. From there the thread runs on to the regional export industries and the global market we know today. For a wider view of how the fruit and its regions fit together, our olive encyclopedia is a good next stop.
Olive oil trade history: common questions
Where did the olive oil trade begin?
The earliest large-scale making and moving of oil is documented in the eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean during the Bronze Age, with the olive itself domesticated somewhere in that broad region several millennia earlier. No single modern country can honestly claim to be the sole origin; it was a shared Mediterranean development.
Why was olive oil shipped in amphorae?
Amphorae were the standard sealed clay shipping container of the ancient Mediterranean. Their tall, two-handled shape stacked neatly in a ship’s hold, protected the oil, and could be stamped or painted with details of origin and merchant, which is exactly why they are so useful to historians now.
What was Rome’s most important olive oil region?
Two stand out: Hispania Baetica in southern Spain and the province of Africa (modern Tunisia). Baetican oil in Dressel 20 amphorae was shipped to Rome in vast quantities, leaving behind the famous mound of broken jars at Monte Testaccio.
Did the olive oil trade stop after the Roman Empire fell?
No. It contracted and became more regional, but oil continued to be traded through Byzantine and Islamic Mediterranean networks and was gradually rebuilt by medieval and early-modern producers before spreading worldwide.