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by AftHurrahWinch 270 days ago
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.

1 comments

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