Ife

Who rules

Name

Not known. No Ife king list can be dated: the lists name Oduduwa as the founder, then (in differing orders) Obalufon Ogbogbodirin, Obalufon Alayemore, Oranmiyan, Ayetise, Lajamisan and others, with no years. If Benin's court date for Oranmiyan's mission (about 1170) is right, the ooni of 1200 belongs to the Obalufon or Oranmiyan generation; if Blier's dating of Obalufon II to about 1300 is right, he is one of the first names after Oduduwa.

Title

Ooni of Ife (the king of Ife)

Since

not pinned

Family

The royal house that traces itself to Oduduwa (the ruling houses rotate in the later practice; their antiquity is not pinned)

Confidence

low

King lists in Wikipedia's List of rulers of Ife; Blier (2015) on Obalufon II; Ogundiran (2020) on the archaeology of the city

Overlord

None. Ife is the ritual source of kingship for the crowned Yoruba kings, not their overlord in any administrative sense.

What the realm holds

• Ile-Ife and its walled town
• its farm villages and forest within about a day's walk
• the shrines and sacred groves of the Yoruba origin traditions
• the glass and bead workshops of Igbo Olokun

How it was acquired

By the traditions, Oduduwa's party took the town from the older people of Obatala; archaeology puts the first wall in the tenth or eleventh century (Ogundiran).

Allies and rivals

The other Yoruba towns honour Ife's ritual primacy (see the yoruba realm). The Benin court tradition makes Ife the source of its second dynasty through Oranmiyan, dated about 1170 by Egharevba and later by others. The Ife traditions of the 'Igbo' raiders whom the heroine Moremi helped defeat are undated; who those raiders were (forest neighbours such as the Ugbo of the coast, in some readings) is not pinned. Owu, later Ife's great rival with its cavalry, is in Ogundiran's account a fourteenth-century threat, not yet a live one.

The realm that morning

The ooni holds the town and its villages. No war or rebellion is attested for the winter of 1199-1200; no dated event touches Ife in 1200.

Wealth

Glass and glass beads (blue and other colours made from local high-lime high-alumina glass at Igbo Olokun, traded north into the Sahel), terracotta and stone carving, iron, cotton cloth (cotton remains of the eleventh and twelfth centuries), farming of yams and oil palm, and the offerings and fees of the shrines. Copper and copper alloys reach Ife from the north by the Niger trade, along with salt; this northern trade is active by the eleventh or twelfth century in Ogundiran's account.

Military

No army is described for 1200. The wall is the only defence attested. Warfare in the forest was on foot with bows, spears and swords; cavalry belongs to the savanna to the north (Owu's cavalry is a fourteenth-century story).

Threats

• Rivalry between royal lineages and the older Obatala lineages, which the traditions remember as recurring
• Raiders from the forest (the undated Moremi story)
• No outside conqueror is attested

Ruler and court

The ooni, a sacred king who in later practice appears in public rarely and veiled by a beaded crown. The later court has palace chiefs (Modewa), town chiefs (Ihare) and priests (Isoro) of the shrines of Oduduwa, Obatala, Ogun, Olokun, Ore and others; these offices are known from the twentieth century and their state in 1200 is not pinned. Wives, heirs and kin of the ooni of 1200: not known.

Great families

The lineages descended from the followers of Oduduwa and from the older people of Obatala, whose conflict the traditions put at the founding of the dynasty; Ogundiran reads the first wall as the work of Oduduwa's party in the tenth or eleventh century. Names for 1200: not known.

Towns and castles

Ile-Ife inside its first wall; farm villages and hamlets in the forest round it. No other fortified place is attested.

Coinage and khutba

No coinage and no Islam. Exchange in kind; beads and later cowries served as stores of value (cowries are not pinned for 1200 here).

Religion

The orisa cults of the Yoruba, with Ife as the place where the earth was created in the myths (the Oduduwa and Obatala traditions) and the home of the Ifa oracle's founding figures. Ife is the ritual centre for all Yoruba towns.

What the year holds

What happened next, if nothing in play changes it. Each event carries what it depends on and what would stop it.

1. 1200 (not pinned)No dated event. In the Benin court chronology (Egharevba) the Benin elders' request for an Ife prince has already been answered (Oranmiyan, about 1170) and his son is made king at Benin about 1200; in Ife's own memory this is the time of the Obalufons and Oranmiyan.Depends on: Egharevba's chronology being right; most other scholars put Oranmiyan later (Bradbury about 1300). Stopped by: A later chronology, in which none of this has happened yet.
2. thirteenth century (not 1200)The second wall and paved roads are built and the pavement fashion spreads; this is the likely direction of the city's growth.Depends on: Continued prosperity of the northern trade. Stopped by: War or the collapse of the northern trade.

Places of note

• Igbo Olokun (Olokun grove): Glass-making and bead workshop on the north side of the town, with crucibles and glass waste dated about the eleventh to fifteenth century (Babalola and colleagues).
• Ita Yemoo: Shrine and pavement site with terracotta and copper-alloy sculpture (Willett's excavations, 1957-1963); dates mostly later than 1200.

Where the sources disagree

• The Ife king lists disagree on order and names (Wikipedia's table numbers some kings twice), and the dynasty is dated anywhere from the seventh to the thirteenth century by different writers; no ooni can be placed on 1 January 1200.
• Wikipedia's Oranmiyan article says he left Benin 'about 1290' and founded Oyo 'in 1300', while the Benin court chronology has him at Benin about 1170: the same man is dated more than a century apart.

Evidence: The city's state rests on good archaeology (walls, pavements, glass works, sculpture, with radiocarbon and thermoluminescence dates). The rulers rest on undated oral king lists recorded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: thin.

On the map: A small city-state; its ritual reach over the Yoruba towns is not drawn as rule.

Primary sources for this realm

Chronicles, registers, sagas and inscriptions written in or near 1200 that cover this entry. Each has its own page with editions, translations and where to read it.

• Ife, Benin, Nri, the Yoruba towns and the Akan: archaeology and recorded tradition (no contemporary text; traditions written down from the 1890s). No text of any kind exists for the forest belt in 1200.