earthworks
Earthworks may refer to:
Construction
*Earthworks (archaeology), human-made constructions that modify the land contour
* Earthworks (engineering), civil engineering works created by moving or processing quantities of soil
*Earthworks (military), m ...
made up of banks and ditches, called ''ya'' in the
Edo language
Edo (with diacritics, ), colloquially called Bini (Benin), is a language spoken in Edo State, Nigeria. It is the native language of the Edo people and was the primary language of the Benin Empire and its predecessor, Igodomigodo. Distribution
...
, in the area around present-day
Benin City
Benin City is the capital and largest city of Edo State, Edo State, Nigeria. It is the fourth-largest city in Nigeria according to the 2006 census, after Lagos, Kano (city), Kano, and Ibadan, with a population estimate of about 3,500,000 as of ...
Nigeria
Nigeria ( ), , ig, Naìjíríyà, yo, Nàìjíríà, pcm, Naijá , ff, Naajeeriya, kcg, Naijeriya officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a country in West Africa. It is situated between the Sahel to the north and the Gulf o ...
. They consist of of city iya and an estimated of rural iya in the area around Benin. The 'walls' of Benin City and surrounding areas were described as "the world's largest earthworks carried out prior to the mechanical era" by the Guinness book of Records. Some estimates suggest that the walls of Benin may have been constructed between the thirteenth and mid-fifteenth century CE and others suggest that the walls of Benin (in the Esan region) may have been constructed during the first millennium CE.
Construction
Estimates for the initial construction of the walls range from the first millennium CE to the mid-fifteenth century CE. According to Connah, oral tradition and travelers' accounts suggest a construction date of 1450-1500 CE. It has been estimated that, assuming a 10-hour work day, a labour force of 5,000 men could have completed the walls within 97 days, or by 2,421 men in 200 days. However, these estimates have been criticized for not taking into account the time it would have taken to extract earth from an ever deepening hole and the time it would have taken to heap the earth into a high bank.
First mentions in the West
The Benin City walls have been known to Westerners since about 1500, when Portuguese explorer
Duarte Pacheco Pereira
Duarte Pacheco Pereira (; c. 1460 – 1533), called the Portuguese Achilles (''Aquiles Lusitano'') by the poet Camões, was a Portuguese sea captain, soldier, explorer and cartographer. He travelled particularly in the central Atlantic Ocean we ...
briefly described the walls during his travels:
The
archaeologist
Archaeology or archeology is the scientific study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscap ...
Graham Connah
Graham Edward Connah (born 11 August 1934) is a British-born archaeologist who has worked extensively in Britain, West Africa and Australia.
Connah was born in Cheshire, UK on 11 August 1934, and educated at Wirral Grammar School, and Cambridge ...
suggests that Pereira was mistaken with his description by saying that there was no wall. Connah says, " ereiraconsidered that a bank of earth was not a wall in the sense of the Europe of his day."
A century later, Dutch explorer Dierick Ruiters offered this account around 1600:
Description
The walls were built of a ditch and dike structure; the ditch dug to form an inner moat with the excavated earth used to form the exterior rampart.
Scattered pieces of the structure remain in Edo, with the vast majority of them being used by the locals for building purposes. What remains of the wall itself continues to be torn down for real estate developments.
fractals
In mathematics, a fractal is a geometric shape containing detailed structure at arbitrarily small scales, usually having a fractal dimension strictly exceeding the topological dimension. Many fractals appear similar at various scales, as illus ...
as the basis, not only in the city itself and the villages but even in the rooms of houses. He commented that "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."
See also
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Ancient Kano City Walls
The Ancient Kano City Walls (Hausa: ''Kofar Na'isa'') were ancient defensive walls built to protect the inhabitants of the ancient city of Kano. The wall was initially built from 1095 through 1134 and completed in the middle of the 14th century. ...
*
Sungbo's Eredo
Sungbo's Eredo is a system of defensive walls and ditches that is located to the southwest of the Yoruba people, Yoruba town of Ijebu Ode in Ogun State, southwest Nigeria (). It was built in 800–1000 AD in honour of the Ijebu noblewoman Oloye Bi ...
*
Oba of Benin
The Oba of Benin is the traditional ruler and the custodian of the culture of the Edo people and all Edoid people. The then Kingdom of Benin (not to be confused with the modern-day and unrelated Republic of Benin, which was then known as Dah ...
Benin
Benin ( , ; french: Bénin , ff, Benen), officially the Republic of Benin (french: République du Bénin), and formerly Dahomey, is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Togo to the west, Nigeria to the east, Burkina Faso to the north ...