Tiny lamps like this are lit on numerous occasions and lighting them is considered a form of worship or meditation. In addition to larger and more elaborate butter lamps somewhere in a Tibetan monastery there is inevitably an assemblage of one or several sets of these tiny lamps also burning. Private individuals also burn them for wish-fulfillment, for penance, or for a variety of other reasons.

This set is an assemblage: the individual lamps are not all exactly the same height or the same diameter, but they have likely been together in this way for many years. They range between 1-1/4 and 1-1/2 inches in height.

With metal items like this it is almost impossible to ascribe an age. We will conservatively ascribe them to no later than the first half of the last century.