It is known that the Egyptians made use of bitumen, in some form, in
the preservation of their dead, a fact with which the Arabians were
familiar. As the Magi held the four elements of earth, air, fire, and
water to be sacred, they feared to either bury, burn, sink, or expose
to air the corrupting bodies of their deceased. Therefore, it was their
practice to envelop the corpse in a coating of wax or bitumen, so as
to hermetically seal it from immediate contact with either of the four
sacred elements. Hence the idea of all the bodies of the Magi left at
Baku being turned to stone, while only the true believer in Mohammed
remained in the flesh.
Marco Polo, the famous traveler of the thirteenth century, makes
reference to the burning jets of the Caucasus, and those fires are known
to the Russians as continuing in existence since the army of Peter the
Great wrested the regions about the Caspian from the modern Persians.
The record of those flaming jets of natural gas is thus brought down in
an unbroken chain of evidence from remote antiquity to the present day,
and they are still burning.
Numerous Greek and Latin writers testify to the known existence of
petroleum about the shores of the Mediterranean two thousand years ago.
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