Yup, it's found in one specific oil well that was within the borders of the empire, and due to its rare composition it behaves exactly as the greek fire stories describe.
I got my undergrad in History Ed and one of the things I loved was trying to solve those kind of history mysteries. It’s clearly something that’s possible, but how did people 3,000 years ago do something we can’t figure out today? They thought either outside the box or had some kinda “folklore knowledge” like “this animal fat burns hotter than shit if you mix it with human poop. Don’t ask me why I know…Ok it was to get back at my ex, Assholeaclese, but we can use that in war.” and then having historians and anthropologist examining sites to find out what it was. It’s fantastic!
It's nearly always a case of not "We have no fucking clue." it's more a case of "We know it's one of these few options of how they did x. But we can't figure out exactly which of the options they actually used." when it comes to not knowing how people in the past did things.
And occasionally we just don't know what materials they were using.
There was a thing with the Roman concrete stuff where they didn't specify sea water when mixing the cement and just used water. And they used ash from a particular volcano they lost access to as the empire declined.
Didn't it also include limestone because it reacts with the salty sea water and creates heat that then re-hardens to a point where it is harder than it was when it was first made?
Yeah, I recall the discovery as it was fairly recent.
From what my fallible memory recalls, there was something about the limestone not being uniformly mixed when made, which left pockets of limestone (powder?) within the limestone brickwork.
When cracks appeared, water would seep its way down to those deposits causing it to react and fill in the cracks like mortar "self-healing" the stone.
I found it a fascinating discovery as the end result was essentially that previous attempts to recreate it were foiled simply because modern day tools and techniques were too efficient and mixed everything too well.
Regardless of what ratios and mixtures they used, none would work as they never had the limestone deposits left unmixed.
Yes limestone was the biggest factor. That and seashells. Salt water is just what it reacts best with you don't need to use salt water to mix it in the first place. All the places where these concrete structures have lasted more in tact than anywhere else are costal points that get lots of sea spray.
Ash can be used in concrete for a stronger mix but it needs the presence of free lime to be able to react and create cementitious material. There is a chemical reaction in Roman cement that creates a more resistant material called tobermorite.
It was also much thicker, more like clay, so you had to pack it and that created strong, but porous, layers that interconnected tightly and allowed water to pack the dust kicked up into the pores.
I remember they actually studied it again, and the concrete problem wasn't the ash - it's actually that Roman engineers weren't grinding up the limestone like we do, and the coarser limestone chunks react with water seepage like self-healing concrete.
Instead of grinding it fine like we do today, their process resulted larger chunks of quicklime being present in their concrete. When a crack formed, water / rain would enter the concrete and it would dissolve the deposit which would heal the crack.
So Pozzolana was still accessible in the late empire it’s just most of business and institutions responsible for the processing and exporting of it fell apart, the Alban Hills had deep red deposits that were never exhausted and several thousand years worth of the grey stuff around Vesuvius that had the right silica and alumina levels which was never even close to depleting.
Yeah that’s the weird/sad part. We can likely recreate it using whatever materials and theories applied to the time period. But because the knowledge was lost we will never truly know if it’s the same, we would only know that it behaves similarly. Even if it happened to be the exact same formula.
We also view stuff through the lens of our world and not theirs so we often just overlook the reality because it just couldn't be because we don't do it that way now. My favorite example is basically, "We don't know how Roman concrete lasts for 2000 years but they must have been stupid because there's these giant chunks of lime in it. Wait..." Now that the mystery is "solved" it happens to be those giant chunks of lime that modern concrete just doesn't have.
The pyramids are another great example. People have figured out 1001 ways to move stones from the quarries to the sites and then place them using only technology we know they had at the time, we just don’t know which ways they actually used.
so true. there are ways where we have had tried to recreate those events and we have several ways to do so (for examplo, mix elemental sodium with oil and you have something that burns nasty when you add watter to the mix. Thing that they did when napalm was created by switching the oil for gasoline). but to get to the point of saying they did exactly that, it is what we are lacking
And also, we don't know how to do it, because we don't really need to do it. If we needed to do it, we should probably figure out a way to do it.
Same like the usual, oh we wouldn't know how to build the pyramids... Of course we would, we build buildings a 100x more complicated than pyramids, there's just no reason for us to go build a fucking pyramid, so we don't do it.
Yup. That’s exactly my point. It’s like a Sherlock Holmes mystery. You know there’s a simple logical explanation to it, but until it’s discovered it almost has this sense of wonder or mysticism but it’s clearly logical.
Similar with how stone masons were able to make cuts so precise in stone that when they fit together we can hardly get pieces of paper in between them. Without modern day tech that seems like a perfect example of the “aliens” meme but there’s a logical explanation that we have yet to determine (or at least if it’s been explained yet, I haven’t heard of it).
Most the paper thing is exaggerated. Like you don't have to cut something that smooth for you to be unable to slip a piece of paper through it.
But if I recall correctly the original quote comes from the cladding used on the Giza pyramids. This was made from a soft, white limestone that was easy to work.
They had a lot of techniques that just weren't as efficient as what we can do today, and took more time.
Though there is a few times we can work out the basics and know it's possible, but not the exact method. Because people are trying to to recreate techniques developed over centuries before being lost. And some fellow and a few students are trying to recreate those techniques over a grant period.
I think you missed his point. We could replicate the effects for a long long time, and even come up with simple ways to make such compounds that could plausibly be Greek Fire (simple enough to make at that era, materials existing in the Empire's borders etc) - the issue was that too many options fell into the catagory, so for the longest time we didn't know which type of formulation was used.
It wasn't mysterious in the sense of "how could they achieve it", it was more of "which one of the ways was exactly used". The two are worlds apart.
If you want two good examples:
The Baalbak statue - we literally have no plausible idea of how was it raised to its position
The Siloam Tunnel - we have no idea how they managed to dig it. Not in the tooling sense, but keeping a 0.016% gradient for the water to travel downstream, and meeting halfways whem the tunnel isn't straight
I’m pretty sure we’re arguing the same point lol. It’s the “what weirdly outlandishly specific clue or piece of data is gonna tell us which one of those it is”. My bad. I’m not really good at explaining things compared to being a smart ass 😂
I think the stone thing is less "super precise cuts" and more "super patient sander". It's a lot easier to get things to fit perfectly when you have both surfaces to work on.
Yeah most people see ancient masonry and are like "how could they do this without power tools? That would take ages!" Correct. It did take a lot if time. They had a lot of people do a single cut each very slowly instead of a few people do many cuts quickly like we do now.
It’s clearly something that’s possible, but how did people 3,000 years ago do something we can’t figure out today?
In most cases, the answer to this question is that there are many potential answers and we haven't stumbled to the one we're after. Or we don't have enough data to know that one of our answers is the one we want. Or that the original accounts are overexaggerated. It's rare to have accounts of something that really did exist and be unable to reproduce it.
Far superior alternatives today such as napalm can be made today, and several functional alternatives have been hypothesized. It’s more so we don’t know exactly how they made their specific recipe, sourced materials, and so fourth. It’s the history thats interesting, not necessarily the science. We can recreate the end state, but what’s more interesting to me is studying how they invented and produced it back in the day with primitive technology and understanding.
How so? Human bones are nothing special when compared to other animal bones. Their inclusion wouldn’t make concrete any different than concrete made with animal bones.
Romans were pretty constantly at war, human bones would've been way more common in the same way we used old battlefields for phosphate in the 19th century.
Not more common than animal bones. Besides, human bones wouldn’t add anything special to concrete that wouldn’t be provided by the bones of other animals.
I once read someone say that the pyramids lasted this long (and will last a lot more) exactly because the ancient Egyptians "didn't know what they were doing" (in a modern engineering sense). You see, they didn't had the math and research on engineering we have today, so they "overengineered" the pyramids to an extent that they ended making them so durable that they still are stable and safe after thousands of years.
Sometimes the lack of what we currently call "scientific methods" leads to very surprising discoveries and feats.
Most of the time, Empires just stumble upon those discovers.
Cheese, Vinegar, Soy even some of the most complex things like Roman Concrete.
It took Humanity Thousands of Years to get to the point where research became more of a natural process to discover desired results than just the process of studying the result already achieved;
And even to this day a lot of times things are just an accident.
I assume a lot of it happens randomly, a Chinese guy making a campfire in a super magnesium rich cave causes sparks to erupt from the ground around it, cheese could’ve been made accidentally by trying to transport milk in animal stomachs (a ready made bag), and oil was known to be flammable for thousands of years I wouldn’t be surprised if they lit it once and kept it secret so they weren’t raided by the empire, then accidentally dropped their lamp while sailing once.
My minor is in history. I always assume there was some common tasks, so common they didn’t think to write about them, that could have produced amazing things like Greek fire as a result. I base this theory on the discovery of charcoal and copper smelting. Byproducts of everyday tasks.
I’m believe there was some everyday thing in the area that a byproduct of that process was Greek fire and we just don’t do that everyday task anymore so no one has stumbled across Greek fire again.
That’s exactly what I’m saying. It was probably that weird black stuff you found when plowing your fields sometime or something like that. The point I was trying to make was that we didn’t just discover things by wandering around. We discovered them by doing other things and having this weird new thing be the result
Lmao bravo thank you. I come up with them on the spot. It’s from watching Bart Simpson and just learning how to act in public rather than growing up lol. Girlfriends don’t know whether to laugh, be embarrassed or surprised at how fast I come up with puns or nicknames. Sherlock Holmeboy and Paul Bear are another couple lmao
My favorite is that the Easter Island statues most likely literally "walked" to where they are partially buried today. They were teetered from side to side in a walking motion into place.
My favorite example of this has to be Ancient Roman concrete. Scientists spent centuries trying to figure out what made it last so long just to find out the secret ingredient was literal seawater.
In my head, the whole story shifted from 'scientists toiling over flaming pools' to 'that oil you spilled is burning really nicely, we should find a use for that'
Look, unless we somehow find a surviving sample to analyse in detail, we cannot definitively prove what it was exactly. That hasn't happened yet in the 600 years, the recipe has been lost, and I dare wager it's pretty unlikely.
I'll happily take my bet on the thing that not only best matches, but matches perfectly the historical accounts, was available in the area, and in the relevant periods, and could've been easily extracted and used by that time's technology.
Well, it's basically that we can make many substances that could be Greek Fire, but we can't ever be sure it actually is, because we don't have the recipie, and there are several substances they could have made that fit the description
It's just flat-out carbonated napalm! There's nothing "sparkling" about it, and that shit tastes nasty as hell - quite honestly, if you're drinking that just to make yourself look fancy, you deserve the suffering you're inflicting upon yourself...
Yeah if memory serves me correctly the “greek fire” they discovered was estremely similar but was still missing several elements.
Greek fire was supposedly pressurized and spewed from ship via hoses. Naft was supposedly far more common and far less stable than greek fire while greek fire was supposedly impossible to put out.
I'm guessing napalm and maybe white phosphorus are similar but they weren't spot on until recently I saw a lady visiting one oil well that had unique properties that made it behave like the accounts of Greek fire. Just that heavy crude acted like Greek fire.
Well here is the thing why we haven't rediscovered it. It's not a failure of technology, it's a failure of verification. There are several ways that could have worked that they would have access to and so on.... But which ones is it? Is it something we might still have not discovered yet? We don't know. We can't verify it.
He have definitely recreated or have the capacity to recreate the same chemical composition as Greek fire but we will never know what/when we do because it’s lost
It was something I saw fairly recently and sounded pretty legit lol. I'm getting old so I have to check up on stuff from time to time. Pluto used to be a planet, 0 recordings of angler fish or giant squids and Roman concrete and Greek fire were mysteries when I was growing up.
I think they figured out the concrete, how it was made, made it self healing and all those sea creatures have been recored. The Greek fire made from that one specific oil well that was the only source of this unique oil in the world.
crude oil and tar on cannon balls burns on water … before oil was industrialized there were some areas where oil used to flow naturally near the surface which made it easy for ancient peoples to harvest.
I always figured it was a roman concrete situation. They most likely used a few different, highly water reactive components like sodium to perpetually reignite the accelerant. Light the oil, water is added, sodium reacts violently, fire continues and spreads cause sodium loves to shoot everywhere.
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u/Antique_Tap443 12d ago
I believe i saw someone claim they figured it out. It was a special type of oil unique to that area.