Walk a hundred metres south-west of the palace ramp and you stand in the shattered rooms of the House of the Oil Merchant Mycenae.
Charred beams, crushed stirrup jars and pocket-sized clay tablets reveal a factory-shop where olives became luxury perfume, cloth dyes scented the air and scribes tracked every drop in Linear B. More than any gold mask, this building shows how commerce underpinned the citadel’s military glamour.
Excavators traced a two-storey L-shaped block hugging the inside of the Cyclopean wall. The ground floor held four plastered storerooms, each lined with sockets for 12-litre stirrup jars.
Beside them a stone-ringed press bed still bears olive-pit impressions; a shallow settling vat coated in hydraulic lime slopes toward a drain outside. Internal ashlar stairs once rose to an upper gallery—probably offices and sleeping quarters for managers and scribes who ran the House of the Oil Merchant in Mycenae.
Every November farmers shook olives from trees on the Argive plain, carting sacks through the North Gate. Workers crushed the fruit in a circular bed with basalt rollers, scraped mash into woven mats, then stacked the mats under a wooden beam press.
The first “virgin” runoff filled terracotta basins; later pressings drained into clay-lined vats to clarify for lamp oil. Highest-grade batches were reheated with saffron, myrrh or sweet marjoram to make po-wi-ti-jo—perfumed oil coveted from Cyprus to Egypt. Jars sat uncorked for four days so volatile resins could marry the olive base before shipment.
Three tablets—Fs 2, Fs 21 and Vn 861—were found scorched beneath a fallen ceiling beam. Written in the same neat hand, they list “House of the Oil Merchant in Mycenae storeroom 2: 24 jars standard, 8 jars saffron blend; deliveries—Temple of Hera 6 jars; chariot crew roster 4 jars.”
Margins carry tiny tally marks that match scratched symbols on jar stoppers, proving the workshop fed both cult and cavalry. Tablets also register barley payments to ten pi-ri-so (press workers), showing wages were issued in grain from the nearby Granary.
The stirrup jar—narrow neck, false spout, twin handles—was a Mycenaean invention perfect for leak-free export. Stamped lugs on many jars bear the double-axe emblem, branding them as palace property.
Petrographic analyses link the clay to kilns only ten kilometres away, but identical stamps turn up at Enkomi on Cyprus and at Tell el-Amarna in Egypt, proving the House of the Oil Merchant in Mycenae supplied international convoys. Resin residue on one sherd contains Levantine pistacia—imported additive for high-end fragrance.
Loom-weight clusters, bone needles and spindle whorls litter one corner room, while chemical traces of murex purple cling to a chunk of floor plaster.
Oil and textiles shared labour: pressed olives produced wastewater rich in potash, ideal for washing and softening wool. Scribes kept parallel tallies of fleeces and oil, suggesting integrated accounting in which perfumed oil and dyed cloth left the palace on the same oxcart.
A charcoal lens above the latest occupation floor dates to c. 1190 BCE—the destruction horizon that toppled the palace. Heat exploded half-filled jars; some still preserve olive-pit sludge fused to the walls.
Bronze scale pans, pumice cleaning stones and a tiny faience scarab bearing the cartouche of Pharaoh Seti I lay in the debris, final testimony to a trade network cut short by flames.
Perfumed oil from the House of the Oil Merchant in Mycenaegreased diplomatic gifts, lit shrine lamps and scented the hair of elite women; its ledgers balanced chariot upkeep and artisan pay.
Amid Cyclopean bastions and royal tombs, this humble workshop proves that trade, not merely war, fueled Mycenae’s glory. Stand among its crumbled vats and imagine resin-laden steam drifting upward—aroma of a Bronze-Age economy that linked olive groves, scribal tablets and far-flung markets into one fragrant engine of power.
