No text of any kind exists for the forest belt in 1200. What there is: at Ife, the potsherd pavements and the naturalistic heads and figures in terracotta and brass, dated by radiocarbon and thermoluminescence to about 1100 to 1400, which show a wealthy sacred kingship in being; at Igbo-Ukwu, the ninth- or tenth-century bronzes and the burial of a titled man that stand behind the Nri priest-kingship; at Benin, the earthworks and the Ogiso dynasty of tradition before the Oranmiyan line, which Egharevba's chronology places around 1200 though the dating is his own; for the Akan, the beginnings of Begho and Bono Manso not before about the twelfth century. The written traditions (Egharevba, A Short History of Benin, 1934; Johnson, The History of the Yorubas, 1921; the Nri traditions recorded by Onwuejeogwu) are twentieth-century and tell what the kingdoms said of themselves, not what was so.
About this source
- Title
- Ife, Benin, Nri, the Yoruba towns and the Akan: archaeology and recorded tradition
- Author
- Various
- Author's dates
- twentieth-century recorders of tradition; archaeologists from the 1910s
- Written
- no contemporary text; traditions written down from the 1890s
- Language
- Edo, Yoruba, Igbo and Akan traditions recorded in English
- Covers
- the forest kingdoms of the Guinea coast from about 900 to 1500
- Kind
- Collection of sources
Everything in this entry is either archaeology or tradition recorded seven centuries after the fact. Dates for Ife's classical period rest on a small number of radiocarbon and thermoluminescence results. The Internet Archive copy of Egharevba (1968 edition) is lending-only and is not linked.
Where to read it
Editions
- J. Egharevba, A Short History of Benin (Lagos, 1934; 4th ed. Ibadan, 1968) (not freely online)
- S. Johnson, The History of the Yorubas (London, 1921) (not freely online)
- T. Shaw, Igbo-Ukwu: an account of archaeological discoveries in eastern Nigeria, 2 vols (London, 1970) (not freely online)
- F. Willett, Ife in the History of West African Sculpture (London, 1967) (not freely online)