The Olive: A Bifurcated Family Tree

The olive may have been domesticated twice. It’s indigenous to Syria and Palestine, and botanists think there was also a spiny variety that was native to the island of Crete. But olives and olive oil have always been important trade goods throughout the Mediterranean, so a lot of crossbreeding has taken place throughout the centuries, which may be why the spiny olive no longer exists as such.

In the eastern Mediterranean, Semitic languages such as Arabic and Hebrew use the words “ zaitun “ for the olive and “ zait “ for olive oil. (The ancient Egyptians borrowed this word as dzait . By about 1,500 years ago, for reasons that must have seemed good to them, they had taken to pronouncing it tjoit .)

Europe, however, first got the olive from the Greeks, who had prehistoric cultural ties with Crete. Our words “olive” and “oil” go back, by way of Latin “ oliva “ and “ oleum ,” to the Greek “ elaiwa “ and “ elaiwon, “ which were probably borrowed from some ancient Cretan language and referred, at least originally, to the spiny olive tree.

The Semitic word is the one used in western Asia and north Africa, while the Greek word has spread throughout Europe. All except for Spain, that is, which adopted “ aceite “ for oil and “ aceituna “ for olive during the Moorish occupation during the Middle Ages, and some Slavic languages which coined their own term from their word for butter.

The medieval Chinese had heard of the olive. To them it was called either qitun (pronounced chee-toon), clearly from zaitun , or qiti , from zait . They were under the impression that it was called the former in Persia and the latter in Syria. (Well, close, fellas.) Anyway, they were aware that it produced an oil “good for frying cakes.”