Zoroastrian Priests Discover Oil, Immediately Invent Getting High Off Your Own Supply

So get this. It’s Persia, sometime in the a-hole of the 6th century BCE. A bunch of Zoroastrian priests — picture dudes in robes with beards that could hide a family of badgers — are having another one of their marathon theological slap-fights. The topic of the day: is the sacred flame of Ahura Mazda, like, *super* sacred, or just *regular* sacred? Can its divine purity be extinguished by mortal filth? One priest, a real firecracker named Bahram the Belligerent (a name I just made up, sue me), decides to settle it. “I’ll show you!” he screams, probably after his fourth flagon of wine. “I shall douse this holy spark with the foulest substance imaginable!”

And so, ranting about the eternal flame’s un-snuff-able magnificence, he grabs a waterskin filled not with water, but with some black, greasy crap he found bubbling out of the ground nearby. Everyone assumed it was just some particularly nasty demon-jizz. Bahram, in a fit of divinely-inspired idiocy, chucks the entire skinful onto the altar. Instead of a sad little *pfffft*, the fire temple goes up in a biblical *WHOOMF*, flash-frying Bahram’s magnificent beard and eyebrows, and sending a pillar of oily, black smoke into the heavens. The other priests, instead of pissing their robes in terror, decided this was, in fact, a sign of Ahura Mazda’s *extreme* pleasure. Apparently, the big man upstairs loved watching shit go boom. The age of petroleum hadn’t dawned — a more accurate term would be the age of holy-shit-that’s-a-big-fire.

Now, did the Achaemenids invent the four-stroke engine and start cruising the Royal Road in souped-up chariots? Fuck no. Don’t be stupid. They weaponized it. Immediately. The Persian war machine, already a world-class pain in the ass, got a hell of an upgrade. Forget flaming arrows. King Darius’s boys were showing up to sieges with catapults that lobbed gigantic clay pots of flaming crude. It was less “shock and awe” and more “oh god, the sky is raining liquid hell.” The Ionian Revolt? Lasted about ten minutes and ended with the city of Miletus being turned into the world’s first barbecue pit. Herodotus, that gossipy bitch, would’ve written that the Persians didn’t just defeat their enemies; they flash-fried them, salted the earth, and then slicked their hair back with the leftover crude.

The whole balance of power in the ancient world got lube-jobbed. Xerxes, instead of whipping the Hellespont like a petulant toddler, probably just tried to set it on fire. The Parthenon? Never built, because Athens was still a smoldering, greasy crater. For a few glorious, flammable centuries, the Persian Empire was a hydrocarbon-fueled juggernaut, powered by priests who were half holy men, half pyromaniac oil barons. They built fire temples so large and belching so much holy smog that you could see them from Babylon. Of course, they eventually ran out of easily accessible surface crude and choked on their own fumes, but for a while there? Glorious. Utterly, moronically glorious.