Quote Originally Posted by Brandy Blue View Post
Well, I'm not really sure about that. They did use oil lamps, but I think they used olive oil or other non-petrol oils. I don't think that you would get a proper explosion using such oils. If you could, then they would not be safe to use for oil lamps. But that's just my guess.
I thought they had oil pits in Ancient times and wiki seems to agree with me.
Probably some oil close to the surface was easy to extract and sometimes borrelled up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum