Image Credit: Wall painting depicting a torsion ‘bag’ press between two poles. People on either side twist the bag in opposite directions using sticks placed through loopholes. From inside the ca.1450 BCE tomb of Puyemre. Wikimedia Commons
OLIVE OIL was one of the major commodities in the ancient Mediterranean. Alongside wine, grain, and perhaps also cheese in some regions, it enveloped and permeated Canaanite, Phoenician, Greek and Roman cultures, and was present in Egypt long before.
Authors like Columella, Palladius, Pliny and Cato the Elder, and the now-lost treatise of Mago the Carthaginian – the father of agriculture – debate what tools and equipment are needed, how and where to grow olive trees, what workers are required, and the array of olives and oils.