Benin City in Nigeria was once known as Edo.
Edo was once the capital of an African empire located in what is now southern Nigeria. The Benin empire was one of the oldest and most highly developed states in West Africa, with its beginning dating back to the 11th century after the fall of the Igodomigodo kingdom.
Situated on a plain, Benin City was enclosed by massive walls in the south and deep ditches in the north. Beyond the city walls, numerous further walls were erected that separated the surroundings of the capital into around 500 distinct villages.
When the Portuguese explorers “discovered” the Benin city in 1485, they were amazed to find a kingdom in the middle of the African jungle consisting of many interlocked cities and villages. They referred to the “Great City of Benin” which is of great significance as at the time there were very few place in Africa that Europeans acknowledged as a city.
These early foreign explorers’ described Benin City as a place free of crime & hunger with large streets and clean houses, they also noted that the people of the city were courteous and honest. The great city was run by a centralised and highly sophisticated bureaucracy.
The Walls of Benin
The Walls of Benin were/are a combination of ramparts and moats, called Iya in the local language. In the past, it was used as a defensive measure.
According to estimates by Fred Pearce of New Scientist, Benin City’s walls were at one point “four times longer than the Great Wall of China, and consumed a hundred times more material than the Great Pyramid of Cheops”.
Pearce writes that these walls “extended for some 16,000 km in all, in a mosaic of more than 500 interconnected settlement boundaries. They covered 6,500 sq km and were all dug by the Edo people during the reign of kings Oguola (c. 1280 A.D) and Ewuare the great (c. 1440 – 1550 A.D). They took an estimated 150 million hours of digging to construct, and are perhaps the largest single archaeological phenomenon on the planet”.
The Guinness Book of Records (1974 edition) described the walls of Benin City and its surrounding kingdom as the world’s largest earthworks carried out prior to the mechanical era.
Benin City was also one of the first cities to have a form of street lighting. Metal lamps many feet high, were built and placed around the city, especially near the king’s palace. Fuelled by palm oil, their burning wicks were lit at night to provide illumination for traffic to and from the palace.
References
https://www.NewScientist.com
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264933732_THE_NEED_FOR_3D_LASER_SCANNING_DOCUMENTATION_FOR_SELECT_NIGERIA_CULTURAL_HERITAGE_SITES
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/18/story-of-cities-5-benin-city-edo-nigeria-mighty-medieval-capital-lost-without-trace
