[rayiner]

Your options are limited when you have none of the tech stack to find the oil, development fields, and extract the oil. Nor the capital to buy the equipment and do it all yourself.

Theoretically, book authors could “hire” everyone needed to turn a popular book into a movie. But in practice they sell the rights to develop the property to a studio in return for a cut of the profits.

[Aspos]

There is a difference in the way it went for Saudis and Iranians. Saudis, not having the tech, capital, knowledge at the time, still retained ownership. Iranians did not. Saudis had enough bargaining power (and balls), Iranian Shakh agreed to exploitative concessions.

Those who had the tech, capital and expertise in the end just lined up in front of Saudis to be hired.

[pazimzadeh]

Finding the oil fields was often easy. The soil was oily to the touch. The Arabs were using the oil for lamps for a while (think Aladdin’s lamp).

[rayiner]

The British company that first found oil in Iran nearly ran out of money before finding it. In the middle east some oil comes to the surface, and in fact the Muslim world invented distillation in the middle ages. But finding sources to support a commercial oil field is another matter.

[AftHurrahWinch]

Aladdin's lamp would have been an olive-oil lamp. Flammable vapor lamps are comparatively modern.

Before the Renaissance, rock-oil/petroleum was used mostly for waterproofing as tar, with a few other medicinal and military uses.

[pazimzadeh]

Highly doubt it was olive oil. But naphta was used as wicks for lanterns and oil and natural gas were burned thousands of years ago.

The real point is not what the oil was used for, but that the oil fields were not particularly hard to find.

From Alexander the Great to Al Masudi, there are plenty of records of oil pools and puddles throughout Persia and Arabia

https://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/199505/land.of.the.nap...

https://www.cyberistan.org/islamic/islmoil1.html