It's amazing how long historians who have studied the past of mankind have not paid attention to what seemed to catch the eye in a variety of written sources, the authors of which are certainly trustworthy, mention of lamps that continuously emit light from hundreds, or even thousands years. And nowhere is it explained at the expense of what energy they burn. Perhaps this made them skeptical about such references. But it was necessary to take into account the psychology of the ancients, who perceived the world around them in a completely different way. They had fact in the first place, and they often simply did not consider it necessary to explain it, especially if the lack of knowledge did not allow doing this.
For example, such an authority as Plutarch described a lamp above the entrance to the temple of Jupiter-Amun, which in his time had been burning for several centuries. The same "eternal" lamp shone under the dome of the temple of the second emperor of Rome, Numa Pompilius. And the Greek writer Lucian, who lived in the II century BC. e. and in the objectivity of which historians could repeatedly be convinced, he said that he saw with his own eyes in Heliopolis, in the forehead of the statue of the goddess Hera, a precious stone that gave such a strong light that it illuminated the entire temple at night.
Not only he saw with his own eyes, but also with his own hands touched the medieval theologian and philosopher Saint Augustine the miraculous lamp in the Egyptian temple of the goddess Isis. And he was convinced that it burns by itself and neither wind nor water can extinguish it. Unfortunately, the priests of the temple could not explain at the expense of what energy this lamp burns:
this information did not reach them, it was lost in the mists of time. In the same way as the information about an unquenchable lamp in Antioch, which caught fire in the 1st century AD, was lost. e., and the last mention of it dates back to the sixth century.
Especially many unquenchable lamps were found in ancient burial places where noble people were buried. Perhaps this was due to religious ideas about the afterlife, where the noble should always be light.
Such a lamp, for example, burning for several centuries, was found in the early Middle Ages in England near Bristol, in an excavated ancient tomb. And the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, in his book Edipus Egytianus, published in Rome in 1652, describes at once several unquenchable lamps found in the ancient burials of Memphis. But all the records were broken by the lantern that illuminated the burial chamber of Evandros, the son of Pallas, sung by Virgil in the Aeneid. When his tomb was opened in 1401, it was established from the records on the walls that this lantern had been burning … for more than 2000 years.
The most famous and most mysterious tomb, illuminated by an unquenchable lamp, belonged to Julia - this was the nickname of this girl, although it is not known whether this was her real name. To quote an excerpt from the book of Andrew Thomas, cited in the journal "The World of the Unknown": In April 1485, in Rome, not far from the Appian Way, they found a mausoleum with a sarcophagus, and in it a young girl of a patrician family. She appeared to be alive in appearance - red lips, delicate skin, slender figure … When they opened the sealed tomb, people who entered it saw a lamp that had been burning for one and a half thousand years. Perhaps, the preservation of the body of a long-dead girl is due to the bactericidal effect of her light.
Data on this find lay for several hundred years in the archives of the Vatican. It was only at the beginning of our century that the professor of theology Pittafiore came across a detailed description made by a witness, the Cistercian monk Fra Benedicto, under whose supervision the tomb was opened and the body of the deceased was removed. about a lamp hanging on a brass hook and burning with an even bluish light. And then the lamp … disappeared. Fra Benedicto himself explains this by the fact that it was simply stolen while the workers were bringing the sarcophagus to the surface, and curious onlookers crowded around. Further searches for it are useless. did not lead.
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Similar lamps were found not only in Europe, but also in China and India. The secret of their burning has not been solved. There is a widespread belief that this is a gift from alien civilizations - paleoastronauts, who taught the ancient earthlings the basics of crafts and agriculture. However, today we attribute too many mysteries to aliens. Andrew Thomas himself, relying on some works of ancient authors, ancient sagas and legends, believes that lamps shone due to electricity. This is confirmed by some archaeological finds. The most famous of these is a ceramic vessel filled with a petrified mass, from which two metal rods protruded. It was found during excavations of a Sumerian settlement that existed two thousand years before our era. When the vessel was shown to electricians, they gasped: a galvanic cell that generates a current. How did the ancient Sumerians use electricity?