196
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2025
196 points (95.8% liked)
Map Enthusiasts
4924 readers
230 users here now
For the map enthused!
Rules:
-
post relevant content: interesting, informative, and/or pretty maps
-
be nice
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
That's a bit late for the Talmud. Other ancient sources do at least mention the ground oozing gross oil sometimes, although use was limited without distillation, which also originated with the Arabs.
That's just extraction from shale, we've been using ground seeps for most of human history. Sumerians were using oil and oil products and that's like around 1000 years before the talmud.
I didn't say no uses, the Natives near where I live liked to seal canoes that way, but without further processing crude oil isn't a particularly great fuel, for example.
What were the Arabs doing with it? At least in the European empires, lamps weren't a big use until after the whale oil era.
Pitch/bitumen whatever you'd like to call it seals wood boats will enough we've been using it since the time Sumer.
It catches fire easily so pretty well anything that could be lit. Chinese records say oil itself was being used for lighting in the first century bce.
You're looking at the Wikipedia too, I guess? It says "fuel", I assume that means a disgusting smoky burn barrel situation. I'd place it in the same category as peat, where maybe there were cultures that ended up exploiting it for heating and cooking, but anyone with a choice didn't. You're definitely not using crude in a nice little oil lantern; that's why we invented refining in the first place.
To answer my own question, Greek fire and asphalt for paving. Maybe the cost of using a medieval-style alembic or an inability to generate more than two fractions prevented more advanced uses. It sounds like they were close, though. You could write a cool alt-history about that.
Yeah, ok so if you can do the research then you know oil has been in continuous use for all of known written history. What they used it for is largely irrelevant to knowing about it and moreover equating "deep pit of stinky, sticky, goop that catches on fire seemingly at random" with evil and moreover hell analogs.