Lighting the Ancient World
Overview
Until the nineteenth century—ironically, on the eve of the light bulb's invention—methods of lighting remained more or less unchanged since earliest antiquity. Three forms of lighting existed, in order of their appearance: torches, lamps, and candles, all of which used animal fat or, in the case of lamps in the most advanced ancient societies, vegetable oil. Thus people thousands of years ago rolled back the darkness, not only of night, but of remote places far from the Sun.
Background
In the characteristic abode of prehistoric man, the cave, light remained a necessity at all hours, because typically the Sun's illumination did not penetrate the rocky depths of these homes. Though popular belief pictures fire and the wheel as more or less simultaneous discoveries—give or take a few thousand years—in fact the wheel only appeared during historic times, whereas man's use of fire stretches back into the earliest recesses of unwritten history.
Among the relatively more recent uses for fire is cooking; but even when humans still gnawed the raw flesh of animals, they required the warmth and light fire provided. Though warmth would seem somewhat more essential to human sustenance than light, in fact it is likely that both functions emerged at about the same time.
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