This from the UK Guardian newspaper:


BENIN EMPIRE

''With its mathematical layout and earthworks longer than the Great Wall of China, Benin City was one of the best planned cities in the world when London was a place of ‘thievery and murder’. ....




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. According to estimates by the New Scientist’s Fred Pearce, 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”.

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.

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 … They took an estimated 150 million hours of digging to construct, and are perhaps the largest single archaeological phenomenon on the planet”.

Benin City was also one of the first cities to have a semblance of street lighting. Huge 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.



When the Portuguese first “discovered” the city in 1485, they were stunned to find this vast kingdom made of hundreds of interlocked cities and villages in the middle of the African jungle. They called it the “Great City of Benin”, at a time when there were hardly any other places in Africa the Europeans acknowledged as a city. Indeed, they classified Benin City as one of the most beautiful and best planned cities in the world.

In 1691, the Portuguese ship captain Lourenco Pinto observed: “Great Benin, where the king resides, is larger than Lisbon; all the streets run straight and as far as the eye can see. The houses are large, especially that of the king, which is richly decorated and has fine columns. The city is wealthy and industrious. It is so well governed that theft is unknown and the people live in such security that they have no doors to their houses.”

In contrast, London at the same time is described by Bruce Holsinger, professor of English at the University of Virginia, as being a city of “thievery, prostitution, murder, bribery and a thriving black market made the medieval city ripe for exploitation by those with a skill for the quick blade or picking a pocket”.

African fractals

Benin City’s planning and design was done according to careful rules of symmetry, proportionality and repetition now known as fractal design. The mathematician Ron Eglash, author of African Fractals – which examines the patterns underpinning architecture, art and design in many parts of Africa – notes that the city and its surrounding villages were purposely laid out to form perfect fractals, with similar shapes repeated in the rooms of each house, and the house itself, and the clusters of houses in the village in mathematically predictable patterns.

As he puts it: “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.”


At the centre of the city stood the king’s court, from which extended 30 very straight, broad streets, each about 120-ft wide. These main streets, which ran at right angles to each other, had underground drainage made of a sunken impluvium with an outlet to carry away storm water. Many narrower side and intersecting streets extended off them. In the middle of the streets were turf on which animals fed.



“Houses are built alongside the streets in good order, the one close to the other,” writes the 17th-century Dutch visitor Olfert Dapper. “Adorned with gables and steps … they are usually broad with long galleries inside, especially so in the case of the houses of the nobility, and divided into many rooms which are separated by walls made of red clay, very well erected.”

Dapper adds that wealthy residents kept these walls “as shiny and smooth by washing and rubbing as any wall in Holland can be made with chalk, and they are like mirrors. The upper storeys are made of the same sort of clay. Moreover, every house is provided with a well for the supply of fresh water”.

The early foreign explorers’ descriptions of Benin City portrayed it as a place free of crime and hunger, with large streets and houses kept clean; a city filled with courteous, honest people, and run by a centralised and highly sophisticated bureaucracy.

What impressed the first visiting Europeans most was the wealth, artistic beauty and magnificence of the city.

The city was split into 11 divisions, each a smaller replication of the king’s court, comprising a sprawling series of compounds containing accommodation, workshops and public buildings – interconnected by innumerable doors and passageways, all richly decorated with the art that made Benin famous. The city was literally covered in it.

The exterior walls of the courts and compounds were decorated with horizontal ridge designs (agben) and clay carvings portraying animals, warriors and other symbols of power – the carvings would create contrasting patterns in the strong sunlight. Natural objects (pebbles or pieces of mica) were also pressed into the wet clay, while in the palaces, pillars were covered with bronze plaques illustrating the victories and deeds of former kings and nobles.

At the height of its greatness in the 12th century – well before the start of the European Renaissance – the kings and nobles of Benin City patronised craftsmen and lavished them with gifts and wealth, in return for their depiction of the kings’ and dignitaries’ great exploits in intricate bronze sculptures.

“These works from Benin are equal to the very finest examples of European casting technique,” wrote Professor Felix von Luschan, formerly of the Berlin Ethnological Museum. “Benvenuto Celini could not have cast them better, nor could anyone else before or after him. Technically, these bronzes represent the very highest possible achievement.”

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/18/story-of-cities-5-benin-city-edo-nigeria-mighty-medieval-capital-lost-without-trace

How can the Portuguese discover a place that’s already existing with a great civility? Who now discovered Portugal.? Blacks please open your brains and free yourselves from mental slavery.

Ratedgang:
How can the Portuguese discover a place that’s already existing with a great civility? Who now discovered Portugal.? Blacks please open your brains and free yourselves from mental slavery.

If they didn't discovered it .. how would it be on the map ....

Ratedgang:
How can the Portuguese discover a place that’s already existing with a great civility? Who now discovered Portugal.? Blacks please open your brains and free yourselves from mental slavery.

I don't get your point.

The Portuguese did not claim to 'discover' anything related to this thread.

They simply reported on what they saw.

This is amazing.
Maybe the ancient Benin was more organized and developed than the present Benin - a disadvantage of one Nigeria and colonization.

OlayemiAshraf:


If they didn't discovered it .. how would it be on the map ....

And how would we know the history ? The so called empire with no writing system. Europeans wrote our history.
Indians, chinese, Japanese, arabs , Europeans wrote their history . Africans were hunting when other tribes were trying to develop.

capitalzero:


And how would we know the history ? The so called empire with no writing system. Europeans wrote our history.
Indians, chinese, Japanese, arabs , Europeans wrote their history . Africans were hunting when other tribes were trying to develop.

Ignorant nonsense.

Africans INVENTED writing.

Today, there exist over 700,000 manuscripts by black Africans detailing the continent's history and vast knowledge in every field imaginable, from mathematics to astronomy.

They are called the Timbuktu manuscripts, and are dated from the 9th century.

We DON'T KNOW that the Benin kingdom ''had no writing system''.

We know they had a ''highly sophisticated bureaucracy'', which had various departments dealing with various countries and trade issues.

We know they exchanged ambassadors with Portugal as early as 1491.

It is INCONCEIVABLE that they had no writing knowledge to store trade agreements and other documents.

There would have been literacy at leadership and administrative levels without a shadow of doubt.

There were NUMEROUS forms of written communication and calculation among Africans, and Benin city was burned down and looted by the British in 1897, so we have no idea what they stole and what sits in their museums, hidden away.

Rosskiiku:


Ignorant little air head. Africans INVENTED writing.

Today, there exist over 700,000 manuscripts by black Africans detailing the continent's history and vast knowledge in every field imaginable, from mathematics to astronomy.

They are called the Timbuktu manuscripts.

We DON'T KNOW that the Benin kingdom ''had no writing system''.

We know they had a ''highly sophisticated bureaucracy'', which had various departments dealing with various countries and trade issues.

We know they exchanged ambassadors with Portugal as early as 1491.

There were NUMEROUS forms of written communication and calculation among Africans, and Benin city was burned down and looted by thee British in 1897, so we have no idea what they stole and what sits in their museums, hidden away.

You are actually very stupid. Even before Christ, China, India, Japan, Europe and Arab had written books. Anyone in Benin empire?
None!
Which languages were used to write timbuktu manuscripts? Probably arab.
All nations and tribes experienced wars and were able to preserve their written history. Stop blame Europeans for your misery.

capitalzero:


You are actually very stupid. Even before Christ, China, India, Japan, Europe and Arab had written books. Anyone in Benin empire?
None!
All nations and tribes experienced wars and were able to preserve their written history. Stop blame Europeans for your misery.

EGYPT which was a black African civilization, had more books written than all those countries you named combined, because EGYPT, a black African civilization, existed, and dominated the world for THOUSANDS OF YEARS.

Without black Africans and ancient Egypt, those countries you mentioned, whom we civilized and taught even speech, wouldn't exist today.

But you are free to suck their nuts like the self-hating, brainwashed slave and bodyguard for white people you've been raised to become.

Papyrus of Maiherpri, Egypt - 4,000 BC


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maiherpri

The Ancient Great Benin Empire

The Benin Kingdom was a flourishing ancient city situated in modern day Nigeria. During pre colonial era, Benin was one of the many highly developed cultures in Africa. This kingdom got its start up around 900 CE when Edo people settled in the tropical rainforest of West Africa.
The walls of Benin City and its surrounding kingdom was the world’s largest earthworks carried out prior to the mechanical era, and was featured in the Genius Book Of Word Record. Benin City was also one of the first cities to have a semblance of street lighting. Huge 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. When the Portuguese first visited the city in 1485, they were stunned to find this vast kingdom made of hundreds of interlocked cities and villages, calling it "Great city of Benin".

Hello. on this page there is a beautifully Illustrated image of the Kings court. The image that shows the snake and the eagle.
Does anyone know the title of the book? or artist. Also where can i get it?
willing to buy or pay for a copy.

Thanks.