BAR Jr.: A Puzzle for Albright

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In the 1930’s, the famous archaeologist William Foxwell Albright excavated Tell Beit Mirsim in central Israel. He discovered rows and rows of large stone basins. The dean of Biblical archaeologists was puzzled. Was this some sort of a factory? And if it was, what was manufactured here?

Each basin had a small circular hole in the center and a gutter carved around the rim. Also, a groove was cut from the outer gutter to the center hole.

At first, Albright thought these basins were dyeing vats. The dye and fabric, he said, went inside the basin. Any dye that splashed out of the center of the basin would be caught in the circular gutter around the rim and would roll back along the short connecting gutter into the center of the basin.

This, however, was not a very satisfactory explanation, as Albright himself came to recognize. The basins were only 30 inches (75 cm) wide. Why would the ancients use such small basins to dye large pieces of cloth?

Two additional features at Tell Beit Mirsim eventually helped to clarify the real function of Albright’s “dyeing vats.” The first was a nearby smooth vertical rock wall into which a rectangular niche was carved 12 to 16 inches (3040 cm) above the height of the rock-cut basins. Large stones, pierced through the center, were the second feature discovered near the rooms containing the basins.

Were the stones with the holes and the wall with its niche related to the basins? If so, what was the relationship?

A few years after Albright excavated at Tell Beit Mirsim, a German scholar named Gustav 066Dalman reconsidered the function of the mysterious basins.^a Dalman was an ethnographer, a scientist who studies ancient cultures as they are preserved in modern times. He observed traditional techniques used today in Mediterranean lands for extracting oil from olives. These techniques suggested the answer to Albright’s puzzle: the installation at Tell Beit Mirsim was an olive oil extraction workshop.

The olive tree was enormously important in the ancient Near East. Its hard and beautifully “rained wood had some mundane and some exalted uses. The whole tree, valuable for its fruit, would not, of course, be cut, but the small branches pruned from the tree each year fueled household fires and the larger branches provided wood to carve into useful and decorative objects. We learn from 1 Kings 6 that olive wood was required for the door of the Holy of Holies in the Temple in Jerusalem and for the two cherubim in the Temple sanctuary. The oil extracted from the olives was used in food, medicine, soap and cosmetics. It was burned in lamps to give light and was used in religious ceremonies. The kings of ancient Israel were anointed with olive oil before they assumed authority. Solomon was anointed at the Gihon spring in Jerusalem (1 Kings 1:39) with a horn of oil from the tabernacle.

Let us return to Albright’s puzzle. If the basins, the wall with a niche, and the large stones pierced with holes were part of an oil extraction factory—how did it work? Olive oil extraction is a three-part process. It involves (1) crushing the olives to a pulp, (2) pressing the pulp to obtain a mixture of oil and a watery liquid, and (3) separating the oil from the watery liquid.

The exact techniques to accomplish these three steps varied at different times and in different places in the Mediterranean world. But the Tell Beit Mirsim complex was representative of Israelite settlements (c. 1,200–587 B.C.) and will help us picture how extraction worked.

To crush the olive, the ancient olive oil producers spread the olives in the trough of a large round stone resembling a wheel laid on its side. The crushing surface was recessed between a raised hub in the center and a raised rim four to six inches (10–15 cm) high around the outer edge. A heavy stone crushing wheel was then placed in the trough. A horizontal axle passed through the center of the crushing wheel and was firmly attached to a pivoting vertical post in the center of the stone on which the olives were spread. A draft animal, or even men or women, hitched to the horizontal axle and walking round and round the crushing basin, rolled the wheel in the trough and mashed the olives to an oily pulp.

This pulp was removed from the trough and placed in round, flat, woven baskets known as aqal both in Arabic and in Hebrew. The aqal were 20 to 24 inches (50–60 cm) in diameter and 2 to 3 inches (5–7 cm) high when full of pulp. The full baskets were stacked on a specially designed stone basin with a groove cut in its lip to catch the liquid as it was squeezed from the pulp.

It was these round stone pulp basins that 068Albright found at Tell Beit Mirsim. Knowing that they were part of an olive oil extraction factory also explained the wall with its niche and the large perforated stones. These were components of the oil press. Most presses included a beam—usually a tree trunk—which served as a lever to apply pressure on the stack of aqal. At Tell Beit Mirsim one end of the beam rested in the niche in the wall. At a point about one third of its length from the niche, the beam passed over baskets filled with pulp. At the far end of the beam the heavy stone lashed through its hole to the beam provided pressure on the stack. Then, as liquid was pressed through the woven baskets, it dropped into the basin or was directed there via the gutter in the lip. (Albright was correct that the gutter caught excess liquid, but it was oil—not dye.)

Other oil presses in antiquity—used in villages even up to the present—improved upon the simple weighted beam by adding a wooden screw mechanism to the weighted end. The screw could be turned by a lever to increase the pull on the weighted end of the beam and thus squeeze more oil from the pulp.

This, however, is not the final step in the olive oil extraction process. The oily liquid pressed from the pulp is a mixture of oil and water. (The flesh of the olive contains 60–75 percent water and only 6–25 percent oil.) Fortunately, oil and water do not mix; so, to obtain the pure oil, it was only necessary to let the liquid stand so that the lighter oil would float to the surface. The water could then be drained from the bottom or the oil ladled off the top and the pure oil put in clay storage vessels for local use or shipment to distant places.

For additional information about ancient olive presses, see: “Of Dyeing Vats and Olive Presses,” by David Eitam, Israel—Land and Nature, Spring 1979; “How Ancient Olive Presses Worked,” by Yehuda Peleg, Israel—Land and Nature, Spring 1981; “The Queen of All Trees,” by Hamish A. Forbes and Lin Foxhall, Expedition, Fall 1978.

In the 1930’s, the famous archaeologist William Foxwell Albright excavated Tell Beit Mirsim in central Israel. He discovered rows and rows of large stone basins. The dean of Biblical archaeologists was puzzled. Was this some sort of a factory? And if it was, what was manufactured here? Each basin had a small circular hole in the center and a gutter carved around the rim. Also, a groove was cut from the outer gutter to the center hole. At first, Albright thought these basins were dyeing vats. The dye and fabric, he said, went inside the basin. Any dye that […]