![]() ![]() ![]() His army was handily defeated, and he had to flee back to Syria for his life. Ironically, when Hieronymus witnessed this extraordinary harvest of the sea, he was under orders to the Arabs and secure the oil for his master, the Macedonian Greek king Antigonus I Monophthalmos-the "One-Eyed." As it happened, Hieronymus's talent for keeping good notes of his observations far exceeded his skills as a military leader. Their final destination: Alexandria, Egypt. On the shore, crews of women and children sprinkled the hunks of tarry oil with sand, stuffed them into leather bags and loaded them onto camels for the long journey across the Sinai. When they come near the floating bitumen they jump upon it with axes and, just as if it were soft stone, they cut pieces and load them onto the raft, after which they sail back." On these not more than three men take their places, two of whom row with oars, which are lashed on, but one carries a bow and repels any who sail against them from the other shore, or who venture to interfere with them. ![]() "They make ready large bundles of reeds and cast them into the sea. The Arabs prized the oily exudate immensely as the Greeks put it, they carried the stuff off "like plunder of war." Nowhere is this scene more vividly depicted than in Hieronymus's own journal: Every time a new "bull" rose into sight, a swarm of axe-wielding seamen leapt onto their reed-bundle rafts and began a frantic race toward the catch. The "bulls," Hieronymus discovered, were great iceberg-like mounds of jellied crude oil - bitumen-that floated up from the depths of the murky water and drifted aimlessly with the wind (See Aramco World, November-December 1984). When they reached their destination, their commander - a general named Hieronymus of Cardia - couldn't believe his eyes: Scores of Arabic-speaking tribesmen were camped on the shore, with pack-camels couched and reed rafts beached, waiting for what they called the thawr-the word was Arabic for "bull"-to appear in the middle of the sulfur-smelling waters. In the three articles of this series, we will look at some of them.įor the ancient Arabian people known as the Nabataeans, history arrived in 312 BC, when an army of Greek mercenaries crossed the Syrian desert into present-day Jordan and headed toward the southern tip of the Dead Sea. But there were genuine oil industries in the ancient Middle East and surrounding areas that employed large numbers of people, that made standardized products, and whose workings had international economic and political ramifications. We think of the petroleum industry as a 20th-century phenomenon, and certainly more oil is used now than ever was in the past, even on a per-capita basis. These e-scale civilizations used bricks by the millions and bitumen by the ton - used them, in fact, on a scale we would have to describe as industrial. It served in the construction of irrigation systems, as a caulk for ships, and as both an additive to strengthen fired clay bricks and a mortar to hold them together. In historic times, the Sumerians, Assyrians and Babylonians each used bitumen from important seeps at Hit and other nearby sites on the Euphrates: Ain Ma'moora, Ain Elmaraj, Ramadi, Jebba and Abu Git. And elsewhere in the Middle East, escaping natural gas, lit by lightning, produced "eternal flames" that were objects of superstitious awe. Recent evidence suggests that bitumen was traded down tile western shores of the Arabian Gulf before the end of the fifth century ac. Seven thousand years ago, the ‘Ubaid people caulked their boats with bitumen, and used it as well in making works of art inlaid with mother-of-pearl and lapis lazuli.Īll this was in Mesopotamia, where petroleum was naturally available from bitumen seeps, oil springs and oil-bearing rock. Prehistoric hunters used bitumen to attach flint spearpoints to shafts, and sickles whose stone edges were held in place with the same substance, which also served as a liniment and a laxative. Humans have used petroleum since the earliest times. ![]()
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