Who among us can imagine life without a chandelier, sconce, or at least a table lamp? I think no one. They got used to it, and “Ilyich's bulbs” have become so firmly embedded in their homes that people get candles only in case of power outages. And even when a Chinese-made lamp tells you to live a long time, and there was no spare house. I don’t know how anyone else, but with me everything happens in full accordance with the law of meanness - light bulbs, which, by a strange coincidence, turned out to be at home in a single copy, burn out in the evening or at night. At such moments, it is annoying - why, in the age of high technologies, when innovations are trying to cram everywhere and everywhere, no inventor can come up with fire-resistant incandescent lamps?
But the ancient masters, representatives of civilizations that have gone into oblivion, knew how to make eternal lamps. Of course, these were not electric bulbs familiar to the eye, but the products of unknown inventors regularly performed their service for centuries, or even millennia. Finds made at different times and in different countries - even on different continents! - prove that in time immemorial temples and tombs were supplied with lighting devices unknown to modern science. China, India, South America and the Mediterranean, in a word, wherever there are monuments and crypts of ancient cultures, people have found and continue to find wonderful lamps there.
Gems?
In 715-673, the ruler of Ancient Rome was Numa Pompilius, whose predecessor was the legendary Romulus. Numa, who took power from the Senate, ended the era of the interregnum, and introduced very useful laws, among which - the prohibition of human sacrifice, and their replacement by bloodless ones. Under this king, the gates of the temple of Janus were never opened, through which the Roman legions went out to participate in armed conflicts. Apparently, this man was a connoisseur of arts and crafts, for by his order beautiful temples were built, in one of which, according to contemporaries, an eternal lamp burned.
And how do you like the epithet applied to the eternal lamp by the Christian philosopher and theologian Blessed Augustine? This husband called the eternal lamp, which gave light to the visitors of the ancient Egyptian temple of Isis, devilish, for neither wind nor water, easily coping with an ordinary flame, were unable to extinguish it. Devilishness, indeed.
But there was also another type of lamp, also noted in eyewitness accounts. Once again I am convinced that the people who describe in their notes everything they encountered and what events they witnessed made an invaluable contribution to history. Of course, not all of what was told is true, but a decent number of people, in no way connected with each other, had no reason to lie, and therefore from their diaries it became known about the second type of lamps. The robbery of tombs was common (I think that even now the marauders are trying to find something like that, which the official archaeological groups did not get to), but when the robber got into the tomb, the lamp, which had worked flawlessly for thousands of years, simply went out. The lamp stopped functioning, and no tricks could bring it to life. And in some tombs, for example,in one of the English crypts, a special mechanism broke a similar lamp. The mechanical knight was intended for this: when strangers fell into the crypt, an armed device threw a spear into the lamp, which hopelessly ruined the lamp.
In my understanding, for normal operation of the lighting device, you need to either change the oil in it, or the wick, or throw up firewood, or organize the supply of electricity. But in all these cases, sooner or later it is necessary to change the device itself. However, the ancient masters somehow managed to bypass the stage of replacement, and their creations did not require an additional portion of oil or a new wick. These were mentioned by the ancient Greek poet, Lucian of Samosata, who lived in the period 120-180. He also wrote that he saw with his own eyes a statue of Hera in the Egyptian city of Heliopolis, in whose forehead a precious stone shone. Whatever shone in the forehead of the goddess, but its light was enough to flood the entire temple with it at night. Much later, in the XVI-XVIII centuries, travelers noted in their records that "stones" similar to Heliopolis were found in India. Shiva, Rama,Sits and others like them were generously illuminated with these devices (in my life I will not believe that the glare of a precious stone will be enough to illuminate the hall).
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Artifact?
There is also no reason not to believe the famous Plutarch in this matter: the philosopher assured that the eternal lamp was fixed over the door of the temple of Ammon in Egypt. During the reign of Justinian, a similar device occupied a niche above the gate of Eddes (Mesopotamia), and, given the date of manufacture stamped on it, calmly illuminated the surroundings for 500 years until it was broken. An eternal lamp was also at the head of the sarcophagus of Pallant, son of Evandros, about whom Virgil wrote in his Aeneid. It was discovered back in 1401 near Rome, and this is what is surprising: if we take the time of Pallant's burial as the date of lighting the eternal lamp, it turns out that it burned for almost 2000 years! They found one in the Gulf of Naples, at the tomb of the unknown, located on the island of Nesis. In 1485, the tomb of Tullia, daughter of Cicero, was found - they carried out simple calculations,and it turned out that the lamp, suspended over the body of Tullia immersed in a transparent solution, burned for nearly 1600 years. The solution, apparently, protected the body from decomposition, but the lamp, after a gust of wind entered the sealed room, went out forever. And so - throughout Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome.
These lamps were hemispheres about half a meter in diameter. They were found not only on the ruins of the ancient world, but also in the desert area - so the conquistadors said, "mastering" South America. The Incas asserted that these lamps burned during the time of their ancestors; but who and when created them - the ancestors did not know either.
Not a single lamp reached the hands of scientists as a whole. Objects that enter the laboratories could only be called lamps with a great stretch, since the devices did not at all resemble lighting devices familiar to our eyes. However, the fact that the integrity of the ancient lamps was violated did not stop the researchers from trying to find out what kind of eternal fuel they worked on.
Not according to Senka hat
Athanasius Kircher, one of the most learned people of his time, known for his works on Egyptology and his penchant for invention, put forward a simple but rather coherent theory. According to his hypothesis, in Egypt, where there were rich oil fields, cunning craftsmen connected thin tubes to a lamp with an asbestos wick, and thanks to this design and eternal refueling, the lamp could burn indefinitely. The theory is good for everyone, but only it had one weak point: the eternal lamps were found not only in places near which there were deposits of "black gold", but also in "dummies".
Then the scientific community suggested that there was some kind of fuel capable of self-healing at almost the same rate as it burned. The controversy continued, and the only thing the researchers were unanimous about was the asbestos wicks. Alchemists revered this refractory material, and called it the skin (wool) of the salamander.
Kircher was also involved in this lampomania. He worked in this direction for a very long time, trying to recreate the oil - the basis of the lamp, and understand the secret of eternal burning. However, the scientist gave up after many fruitless attempts. There remained his colleagues who wrote voluminous treatises on this topic (they would now be called master classes). So I can hear the creaky voice of the gray-haired professor: “And today we will make with our own hands a very useful object for the house - an eternal lamp! Prepare the sulfur, alum, get the Venetian crystal borax in powder - we start! I took these components not from my head, but from the composition of Bartolomeo Korndorf. He wrote the following:
Sulfur. Alum. Sublimate to a sulfur color. Add Venetian crystal borax in powder, then pour over high-purity alcohol … This is for nutrition. Remove a thread of asbestos as thick as your middle finger and as long as your little finger, put it in a Venetian vessel …
True, no matter how the hypothetical professor fought, no matter how Bartolomeo and others like him painted the details of creating an eternal lamp, no one was able to reproduce the ancient invention.
But it was! And the longer scientists fought over the mystery, the more legends appeared around the mysterious lamps. They did not smoke (a light cloud when smashed or extinguished does not count), and therefore a bold assumption was put forward, according to which it was with such a lamp that ancient painters worked on their frescoes: this explains the absence of soot on the painted sections of the walls. The modern theory suggests that some of the eternal lamps were Lazarev's rings and worked on the energy of the Earth's gravitational field. This explains the lack of demand for oil and electricity. But if there are at least some theories for lamps, then there are not even assumptions to explain the glow of precious stones in temples and statues.
Abode of souls?
Think of Aladdin's famous lamp. It was there that the good genie dwelt, a wish-fulfilling spirit. But then in the east. In the west, human souls and various nasty little things from the subtle world were “sealed” into lamps, jugs, jars and other containers (so that it would be discouraging to harm people). Whatever legend you look into, it has always been believed that the spirit, whoever it is, has the ability to glow. If we take all this into account, and add the fact that the miracle lamps did not give soot and burned even without oxygen, then the conclusion suggests itself - does their light have anything to do with oil, electricity and similar sources energy?
Remember at least the ritual burial. Each of the lamps in the tomb illuminated the body, which they tried to keep intact at all costs. As you know, before embalming, the organs of the deceased were removed and sealed in vessels, later installed next to the mummy. But there was one more thing, that divine spark that makes a person alive. "Immortal soul" - one has only to remove this concept, and many religions will collapse, as their foundation will disappear. All teachings about the Spirit will sink into oblivion. Who knows, maybe the lamps were completely empty in the physical plane, and there was just the life force of a person? Naturally, such a relic should not have fallen into the wrong hands, and therefore a self-destruction mode was invented for its protection: when the tomb was opened, the eternal lamp fell into disrepair.
Many teachings claim that after death the soul is reunited with the Higher Power. But this is in the event that no action is provided for the safety of the body of the deceased - the same embalming, for example. In Ancient Egypt, there was the "Book of the Dead", and in it - "The Chapter on Ascent to the Light." If the pharaoh knew this chapter by heart, then at any moment he could return from the world of the dead, leave the tomb, walk among the living and the same way fearlessly get back. But in order to make such a journey, the pharaoh needed … that's right, vitality. It was she who was kept next to the tomb in the form of a hemisphere, which, due to the glow, mankind erroneously recorded in the category of lighting devices.
And you can't guess which theory will turn out to be correct in the end. And is there such among them? Is it a lamp? Or a vessel for the soul? Or something else? In any case, until a brilliant researcher (or a random person - it is also possible) does not find the right answer - we are unlikely to predict it, and having learned the truth, we will say that this is impossible.