For the people of ancient Egypt, the sun was considered sacred and was worshipped as the highest deity at that time.
As the hieroglyphs from the Egyptian pyramids show us, Akhenaten and his family held funnel-shaped objects in their hands, which were directed towards the sun's disk. Whether the objects were for ritual purposes some kind of mirrors is not known in detail.
The archaeological findings from the region where the Olmecs lived provide a little more clarity that solar radiation could be concentrated in ancient world. This civilization used concave mirrors and this form of mirrors can not explain any other use.
It is quite conceivable that these artifacts found their use for igniting the fire.
The brilliant Portuguese engineer Manuel António Gomes lived in the 20th century and studied and built several solar concentrators. One of them presented at the World's Fair in Saint Louis in 1904, where his solar furnace Pyrheliophero generated a temperature of 7000 °F.
For this he received two gold medals and the main prize of this exhibition.
His invention was certainly so unique because he used only a small part of a dish to focus the light, and it was a feat that no one in the modern world came close to achieving in the 118 years that followed.