The mighty medieval capital now lost without trace
March 18, 2016 5:06 AM   Subscribe

This is the story of a lost medieval city you’ve probably never heard about. Benin City, originally known as Edo, was once the capital of a pre-colonial African empire located in what is now southern Nigeria.
From the Series : Stories of cities
posted by adamvasco (22 comments total) 50 users marked this as a favorite
 
Another thing of beauty that my idiotic fucking country destroyed.
posted by terretu at 5:14 AM on March 18, 2016 [4 favorites]


I came here to post this! This is an amazing story.
posted by josher71 at 5:16 AM on March 18, 2016


Oooh! I was actually *just* reading about part 3: the birth of Baghdad was a landmark for world civilisation and wondering about the rest of the series.

(Sadly, the bulk of my knowledge about Edo, the topic, or indeed, that part of Africa *cough* pre-discovery *cough* is from one of those books (in this case The Giant Book of Lost Worlds by Damon Wison, which I have also been thinking about this week, since I just started reading H Rider Haggard.)
posted by Mezentian at 5:16 AM on March 18, 2016


There is something particularly evil about systematically annihilating something sophisticated in order to reinforce one's belief that its creators are inferior.
posted by acb at 5:45 AM on March 18, 2016 [15 favorites]


“When Europeans first came to Africa, they considered the architecture very disorganised and thus primitive. It never occurred to them that the Africans might have been using a form of mathematics that they hadn’t even discovered yet.”

I love this passage!
posted by mareli at 6:04 AM on March 18, 2016 [18 favorites]


Reading the Wikipedia article on the destruction of Benin, I think the destruction was more motivated by greed and arrogance rather than a need to reinforce the belief in the British that they were superior. I don't dispute for a second that it was an atrocity, but I don't necessarily agree with acb's interpretation of the cause.
posted by YAMWAK at 6:22 AM on March 18, 2016


Thanks, for linking to this. I'm going to be following this series now.
posted by nangar at 6:31 AM on March 18, 2016


You guys can't fool me -- Edo is now Tokyo!
posted by MrJM at 6:40 AM on March 18, 2016 [4 favorites]


I think the destruction was more motivated by greed and arrogance rather than a need to reinforce the belief in the British that they were superior.


Tomato Tomahto.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 6:51 AM on March 18, 2016 [4 favorites]


Some examples from Ron Eglash of alleged fractals in other African stuff. I'm not sure what this really tells us about the mathematical culture of the people who built the structures.

Four times the length of the Great Wall of China (highly debatable but at any rate surely more than five thousand miles) is rather a lot. The Aurelian Walls of Rome were about twelve miles, I believe. It tends to suggest Benin had more slaves than it really knew what to do with. I'm sure the British were wicked enough to cart all that completely away, but I'm surprised to hear they had the energy.
posted by Segundus at 7:09 AM on March 18, 2016


Tomato Tomahto.

Kinda, yeah. Neither are moral justifications for the action, but the difference may be important if you don't want it to happen again.
posted by YAMWAK at 7:12 AM on March 18, 2016


Now this? This right here? This is why I love MetaFilter. This article and the subsequent thoughts I had about it made for a very pleasant ride on the BART train this morning . Thank you.
posted by pipoquinha at 7:42 AM on March 18, 2016 [4 favorites]


If you want more depth, see Benin City before 1897: A Town Map and a Map of the Palace Area with Description, a scholarly article. I've only skimmed it, and the map itself is a bit wanting. But it looks like a reasonable synthesis of historical and archaeological facts.

I was particularly struck by the observation that a lot of the loss of the old wall structures is from the 20th century, builders scavenging materials from the old ruins. That happens the world-over from cliff dwellings in Northern New Mexico to opulent buildings in the center of Paris.
posted by Nelson at 7:50 AM on March 18, 2016 [3 favorites]


Fantastic post; I knew nothing about this. I was frustrated by "Then in 1897, the city was destroyed by British soldiers – looted, blown up and burnt to the ground"—surely that calls for a little more history!—but I guess I can read more elsewhere.

(It wouldn't be the Grauniad without a blatant typo: "Benvenuto Celini.")
posted by languagehat at 9:20 AM on March 18, 2016 [2 favorites]


Here you go languagehat; Benin, the sack that was and a bit more.
posted by adamvasco at 10:16 AM on March 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


I was very frustrated with a History of Africa course I took in university, because the main text at the time pointed out all these wonderful societies and civilizations, like Benin, Meroe, and Great Zimbabwe, and pointed out that, at that time, the only things we knew about them were they actually did exist and were likely very impressive. It's as if the only things we knew about Rome was that it was an empire that stretched from Spain to Iraq, and they had some interesting ideas on architecture.
posted by GhostintheMachine at 10:44 AM on March 18, 2016 [3 favorites]


> Here you go languagehat; Benin, the sack that was and a bit more.

Thanks!
posted by languagehat at 12:24 PM on March 18, 2016


> I find it difficult to accept that the oldest complex African civilization dates back only to the 11th century.

The Kingdom of Kush and Ghana Empire were considerably older.
posted by languagehat at 12:28 PM on March 18, 2016 [4 favorites]


And of course, Egypt was an African civilization as well as a Mediterranean one.
posted by tavella at 12:34 PM on March 18, 2016 [3 favorites]


Thank you so much for posting this! I've been dying to read more about sub-Saharan African history prior to European invasion.
posted by teponaztli at 1:39 PM on March 18, 2016


Thank you, I love this.
posted by blue shadows at 12:41 AM on March 19, 2016


One minor error in the article bugs me, so I'll drop a note here. Olfert Dapper did not visit Benin, he famously compiled wrote his Description of Africa without ever setting foot on the continent.
posted by Kattullus at 4:01 PM on March 19, 2016 [2 favorites]


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