The ancient Egyptians undoubtedly used petroleum for embalming and medicinal purposes, and filled the cavities of dead bodies with asphaltum, so that nomadic Arabs in later times have been known to use mummies stolen from Egyptian tombs for fuel. Petroleum in its more fluid form is also supposed to have been used to preserve the ancient papyrus against the boring of insects and the rust and rot of time. To this extent at least historians and archæologists are indebted to this gift to man. Rome, in her gradual conquest of the Western world, made all known oil supplies her own. Consequently allusions which obviously refer to petroleum are frequent to the Roman historians; and here once more it was applied to the use of religion. The early records of Russia, the Scythian nation of ancient history, are obscure, but it is quite clear that the properties of petroleum were known to them for ages. When Igor descended on Greece, his vessels were destroyed by a fire that burned on water; which has led some modern historians to believe that petroleum entered into the composition of “Greek Fire,” the secret of which is lost. The Greeks, indeed, are said to have made ingenious use of petroleum at all times. Those who have read in Gustav Flaubert’s “Salammbo” the story of the rising of the mercenary troops of Carthage after the first Punic war will recall the tactics of one of the Greek captains who turned back the Carthaginian elephant corps, by sending among them swine smeared with petroleum and ignited. In later days the greatest of Russian Emperors, Peter the Great, showed himself alive to the commercial value of the Baku wells. When in 1723 he obtained from Persia control of the Baku Khanate, he ordered the seizure of as much white petroleum as possible, and directed that a refining master be sent there. “This,” remarks a historian of petroleum, “is the first record of a vacancy for a manager of an oil refinery.”