Highly doubt it was olive oil. But naphta was used as wicks for lanterns and oil...

Highly doubt it was olive oil. But naphta was used as wicks for lanterns and oil and natural gas were burned thousands of years ago.

The real point is not what the oil was used for, but that the oil fields were not particularly hard to find.

From Alexander the Great to Al Masudi, there are plenty of records of oil pools and puddles throughout Persia and Arabia