Experiment with Kindling Oil Lamps

Abstract

This article deals with the daily technology of ceramic oil lamps from the period of the 1st century AD until the first half of the 7th century AD. The questions underlying in this article include the following: How long did combustion take and what was its intensity? Were wicks pulled and when? Was the oil poured into an already-burning lamp to increase the burning time, as Dr. Amar Zohar, of Bar Ilan University suggests? If so, how was this done? And a last question: Were the ceramic lamps used for Hanukah and Shabbat? For the experiment, I chose ceramic lamps from the 1st century AD and a type of early Islamic ceramic lamp dated to the first half of the 8th century AD. For kindling material, I used non-distilled olive oil, castor oil, and linseed oil. Notably, olive oil was the most widely used oil in the Levantine region during the selected historical period. However, this oil was expensive, which is why poor people used castor oil (Bouras and Parani, 2008, p.3). I used cotton and flax as material for wicks. All weight measures and measures of light intensity were conducted with calibrated kitchen scale brand EC403 and a digital lux meter brand HP-881B, respectively. The experiment was documented with video and photos, and all the data was recorded into a table. The experiment was conducted indoors for health and safety reasons.

Keywords

• fire
• roman era
• israel
• early middle ages