If you are reading this Page on your computer screen you probably live in a town or village where you take electric lighting for granted: if it gets dark indoors you turn on the light; if you go out at night there are street lights everywhere. But until less than a hundred years ago it was not like this at all: even today in many European countries such as Spain there are still whole villages where there is no electricity; in Africa and Asia there are still whole countries where there is no electricity except in the very largest towns. Without electricity almost the only way you can make a light is by burning something.
The main sources of lighting in Ancient Egypt and the rest of the ancient world were lamps, candles and torches - when we are talking about lighting in the ancient world these words have very special meanings.
The Ancient Egyptians used mainly lamps so this Page is only about lamps; another Page tells you about candles and torches.
Lamps burn a liquid. Many different liquids can be used, and we usually refer to any liquid used in a lamp as a lamp oil. The oil lamps you can buy in the shops today usually burn paraffin (kerosine). Paraffin is made from petroleum (from oil wells) but the first oil well was not drilled until 1859, so until then almost all lamps burnt oil made from animals or plants - in many parts of the world they still do.
Paraffin lamps are quite different from lamps burning oils from animals or plants, and are discussed at the end of this Page.
You can make oil from many different plants by squeezing the oil out of their nuts or seeds. Today the cooking oil you can buy in your local supermarket is often a blend (mixture) of several different vegetable oils, some from plants which do not grow in Britain. But the Ancient Egyptians and other ancient people could only use plants which grew near where they lived. The Greeks and Romans used olive oil, and still do, but olive trees did not grow in Ancient Egypt, so the Ancient Egyptians used oil from flax, walnuts and almonds and other nuts, sunflower and sesame seeds, wheat and castor oil plants. The finest lamp oil, used in Pharaoh’s Palaces and in the Temples, was made from sesame seeds.You can also make a lamp oil from soft animal fat, but this produces a lot of very unpleasant smoke when it is burnt. This is the cheapest lamp oil. The Ancient Egyptians used this when they were digging out the Pharaohs’ tombs in the Valley of the Kings, but not when they were doing the paintings on the walls inside the tombs as the smoke would have spoilt them. We know this because the Egyptians kept written records of everything, including the numbers of wicks and the amount and type of oil used every day by the tomb builders!
You can also make lamp oil from the livers and other parts of sharks and certain other “oily fishes” which live in the sea, and from whale and seal blubber. Inuit and many other people still make lamp oil this way, but of course the Ancient Egyptians did not, because they only caught fresh water fish in the River Nile.
In the very high mountains of the Himalayas and Andes few plants grow which humans can eat, so the people who live there are almost totally dependent on animals such as yaks and llamas which are almost the only animals which can eat the plants which grow there. Milk, whether from yaks or llamas or any other mammals, can be drunk or made into cheese, yoghurt or butter, and butter can be used in lamps - the Temples in Tibet are lit by lamps burning butter. Although the Ancient Egyptians milked cows, sheep and goats, they had plenty of other sources of oil for lamps so did not use butter.
Most things, including of course the oil in a lamp, will not start to burn unless you heat them (set light to them) first.The ignition temperature of any substance is the temperature we must heat it to before it will catch fire. If you were to put a match to a chip pan full of cold cooking oil (but please don’t!) the match would go out and the oil would not catch fire: the heat from just one match is not enough to raise a whole pan full of cooking oil to its ignition temperature. But the ignition temperature of cooking oil is only slightly higher than the temperature needed to cook chips, and so if we are cooking chips by heating a whole pan of cooking oil on a gas hob and take our eyes off the chip pan for even a few seconds the oil may overheat and reach its ignition temperature and catch fire. It will then burn very quickly with thick clouds of black smoke. A chip pan fire is very dangerous - and would be no use at all for lighting a room! If we want to burn any sort of oil to light a room we must use a lamp with a wick.
Take a strip of newspaper or kitchen roll and dip one end into a bowl of water. The water will start to rise up the paper. You can see this more clearly if you add a few drops of ink or food colouring to the water. The paper acts as a wick. Most liquids (except mercury) will rise up a wick in this way; how far they rise up the wick depends upon what the liquid is and what the wick is made of.
Newspaper is fine if you just want to show how a wick works, but a paper wick is useless for anything else as it will just fall to pieces as soon as it gets wet: the best materials for wicks are natural fibres such as flax and linen, wool and cotton. The Ancient Egyptians made their wicks by twisting together the fibres from flax plants. Here is the hieroglyph for a twisted flax wick: the Egyptians also used this hieroglyph for a h sound.
A lamp consists of a container for the oil with a wick dipping into the oil. The oil rises up the wick. If we then put a match to the end of the wick the heat of the match is enough to raise the small amount of the oil on the wick to its ignition temperature and it will start to burn with a yellow flame, giving out light. As the oil is burnt up fresh oil rises up the wick to take its place and so the lamp will continue to burn and give out light.
The ignition temperature of the wick is much higher than the ignition temperature of the oil, so as long as all of the wick is wet with oil it will not catch fire, although if it dries out in places it may char (go black and crumbly, like charcoal). Then the wick must be trimmed using special scissors. You must not allow the lamp to burn dry (run out of oil).
A lamp will not work without a wick, but it is the oil that is burning, not the wick.Paraffin rises up a wick quite a long way, but most animal or plant oils only rise up a wick a few millimetres - this is why paraffin lamps are different from those burning animal or plant oils. Lamps burning plant or animal oils must have very short wicks above the surface of the oil.
Greek and Roman lamps were usually shallow dishes made of gold, silver or bronze or stone or pottery, with a cover to stop the oil from spilling and a small hole at each end, one for the wick and the other to fill it with oil. Here is a photograph of a modern reproduction of an ancient Greek lamp. Aladdin’s magic lamp was like this only made of gold.
Lamps like this are easily carried and can be tipped or tilted a small amount without going out or spilling oil. Workers in the Greek silver mines even wore oil lamps like this strapped to their foreheads, like coal miners use electric lamps today!
Lamps like this, burning vegetable or animal oil, have to be quite wide and shallow because the part of the wick above the surface of the oil has to be very short. If the lamp were tall and thin, once it had been burning for a short time the oil level in the lamp would have gone down too far for it to rise up the wick far enough to burn.
Egyptian lamps often used a floating wick. The wick was threaded through a metal or ceramic ring which was mounted on a float of some sort. This meant that the container for the oil could be any size and shape.
A Google search will also produce other sites with pictures of Egyptian lamps, but bear in mind that some of these sites contain serious errors, for example reference to the Egyptians using olive oil.
Most modern lamps burn an oil based on paraffin, a mineral oil made from petroleum. This rises up a wick several centimetres, so paraffin lamps can be almost any shape and size.
The top of the wick runs through a metal collar, and a knob at the side allows the height of the wick above the collar to be adjusted to make the flame bigger or smaller, even while the lamp is alight. Often the oil is coloured or scented.
Paraffin heaters also need a wick, and work the same way, except that they are designed to burn with a blue flame, which gives out a lot more heat and a lot less light.
The Tilley® Lamp, and also the Primus® Stove, also burn paraffin, but in a quite different way, without a wick. They have been largely replaced by lamps and stoves burning propane or butane (Camping Gaz etc) and are considered in the Page on the lightweight propane burner.
