It's hard to search in this subreddit for this, or my search-fu is weak. Not to discourage more info, but these are some previous threads that may be of interest (maybe tangental, as in the first one):

• How did people light cigarettes and other flammables before matches came out?
• How did common households handle fire before the invention of the match and the lighter?
• how did people light candles?
• Romans and starting fires.
• One for the Prehistorians: Where was fire first controlled? (And other questions).
• How did people in the middle ages light candles?
• Before matches were invented, how did people start fires in their houses or light candles first thing? Flint and steel?

I don't know what people used in ancient times, but by the early middle ages a simple striking steel and a flint was the usual method of lighting fires, and remained so right up into the mid-19th century.

Early matches were not that cheap, and at first were only available in large urban markets.Usually with a large cooking fire, you would try to rekindle it each morning from embers left over from the night before. If this was not possible, you would relight the fire with fresh tinder and kindling.

Here's how a worked: a small peice of curved iron would be stuck against a finger-sized chip of chert, flint, or other type of what we today call microcrystalline quartz. The iron striker was called a "firesteel" and looked pretty much like the instrument we use today by that name, except it was made of iron or steel of instead of magnesium ferrocerrium. In my own experiance, it usually takes about 5-10 tries to get a spark to catch, although I'm sure a lifetime of practice (rather than a few re-enacting weekends) makes some difference there.