Benin City, the mighty medieval capital now lost without trace | Hacker News Reader

Benin City, the mighty medieval capital now lost without trace

theguardian.com

118 pointsglobba2237 comments

I had to make a HN account once I saw this title. I'm Nigerian. Benin City is clearly still there. The modern Benin city is very obviously divided into 'old Benin' and Benin city proper.

So no, not 'lost without a trace'.

Ha!

I was born and grew up in Benin City!!

In summary, the city definitely exist but we have refused to maintain our historical artifacts. Although it is easy to blame the "evil British" , I think we back home can do better to preserve historical stuff.

But the British really messed up a lot of places. But after a while we have to take responsibility.

It's really cool to discuss where I grew up in a global platform though.

domo! woyiena?

Oyese!

But I'm not Bini though. I'm Igbo, from Anambra.

Google satellite view of modern-day Benin City shows clear evidence of past earthworks in the countryside surrounding. In particular traces of an earthen structure runs northeast out of the city starting at about St. Savior Rd, through Urhokuosa, Erua and Ethor to Irrua. A distance of 50 miles, and perhaps further.

https://www.google.com/maps/@6.3474921,5.747339,27322m/data=...

Wow, that city has one of the best visible-from-sky modern artifact collections I've seen:

https://www.google.com/maps/@6.3105913,5.595516,407m/data=!3...

The way those artifacts gradually start to blend with the greenery is fascinating. It'd be fun to play there as a kid I'll bet

Plenty of those early huge capital cities got lost. Angkor Wat, Edo, Vilcabamba, Troy, Helike, Ai, Aztlán, Ys, Shambhala, Xanadu, Carthago, Karakorum, Niniveh, Persepolis, Ur, Samarkand, ...

See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_city

I wonder whether there should be a word for the feeling you get when reading something like this and thinking "Please don't be the British again..."

Dammit :(

Read other sources on the history of the sack of Benin. This article romanticizes a city with human sacrifices and slave trade.

From Wikipedia's article on the Benin Massacre:

But the way Benin treated its slaves and the public display of large quantities of human remains hardened British attitudes towards Benin's rulers. The trader James Pinnock wrote that he saw 'a large number of men all handcuffed and chained' there, with 'their ears cut off with a razor'. T.B Auchterlonie described the approach to the capital through an avenue of trees hung with decomposing human remains. After the 'lane of horrors' came a grass common 'thickly stewn with the skulls and bones of sacrificed human beings.'

Oh I know. There's always many sides to these stories. I don't feel bad about it other than in an abstract modern moral way, it's history.

But the number of times something from the 18th-20th centuries like this comes up and you find out it was our ancestors...

I sometimes wonder whether this'll be the same reaction Americans will have in 200 years time. Things always look better when justified in the moral context of their time.

No, no, don't worry; there's been more than one occasion when I silently repeated to myself: "please not Texas, please not Texas..."

You're in luck, it's Florida again.

History is written by the victors justifying themselves.

Remember, this occurred in an era of "Social Darwinism" and "noble savages", etc.

That's not to say that these accounts aren't correct, but you can't just accept them at face value without some archaeological evidence to back them up.

You might be happy to hear that Jesus College at Cambridge just decided to remove the Benin Bronze they've had since 1897 and that it might go back to Nigeria: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/12188018/Cambridge-coll...

Actually, not really. I was disappointed with the recent controversy over the Cecil Rhodes statue at Oxford. I thought it was incredibly narrowminded and a poor reflection of the entire purpose of academic freedom. Quite glad when they kept the statue.

History always has multiple points of view, our most recent struggles reflect only one.

I think this is different, sounds like the Benin Bronze was basically stolen from the capital.

Well it was taken down because it was representative of an atrocity, not because it was stolen.

Although, arguing down that route, war spoils are a tricky thing to discuss historically. "Stolen" is very different from "appropriated after successful war". Like I've said above, history and modern morals don't always mix. For that matter, current events and modern morals don't always mix. Take the Iraq oil situation, a bit more than a statue worth there.

When I was a kid, I was frustrated by the absence of an RTS or city-building game set in sub-Saharan Africa. I continue to be annoyed by this.

Heart of Africa on Commodore 64?

I got caught up in that C64 madness. I walked away from that game thinking that the quickest way to victory includes robbing the natives. Never again.

Not Sub-Saharan but I had fun with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharaoh_(video_game).

Also "Age of Empires II HD: The African Kingdoms" is out.

http://www.forgottenempires.net/aoak

Never heard of Benin... and after reading the article, I "knew": lost without trace, great culture, great wealth and great security for all its people..., great artists. And in the end - destroyed by the Britains.

Hm ... so after reading Wikipedia, I knew, it is not lost without trace, but the great Kingdom of Benin was also the great capital of slave trade, with human sacrifices(in the end about 23 a day) and all in all a deep despotic society, etc.

But the artists are indeed great.

This is the fifth of a fifty-part series Jack Shenker is doing for the Guardian. So far he's cranked out one-a-day.

Do you mean that he's overseeing the entire series? Each of the five installments that are up right now were written by different authors.

Is the word "medieval" commonly used to refer to some African time period? My understanding is that the term refers specifically to the Middle Ages, which is a time period in European history, so it wouldn't make any sense to talk about a "medieval capital" in Africa (especially far away from the Mediterranean). The British only annexed Benin in 1897, long after the Middle Ages.

Notice all the hand-waving in the article about mathematics. Mathematics proper, as in the derivation of theorems from axioms by means of proof, was discovered by the Greeks, and unless the residents of Benin City, or the Maya, or any other non-Western society that biased academics seek to rehabilitate were similarly deriving theorems from axioms by means of proof as did Euclid, speaking of their supposed mathematical prowess is extremely disingenuous and misleading.

Mathematics as far as it being a branch of logic was pretty much invented by the greeks as you say.

And the mathematics mentioned in this article are definitely 'tenuous' at best. I clicked on the 'African Fractals' and didn't really see anything that I would consider mathematics, although I did see some organizing principals I guess.

However the claim that mathematics is either 'theorems' or bust is not really valid standpoint in general... seeking one must by a practical definition of mathematics include at least Egyptians (at least in practical geometry), early South American (at least in practical geometry). Neither of which had any strong belief in the necessity or ideal of 'proving' theorems. Further one should include without doubt early Indian contributions which covered both practical and theoretical mathematics and early Chinese contributions although they seem grounded in theorem based approach

> However the claim that mathematics is either 'theorems' or bust

The theorems of mathematics are what distinguishes it from other enterprises and provides us with a degree of certainty of the correctness of our conclusions that would otherwise be unavailable. No number of (Euclidean) triangles measured, however great, would convince us equally well that their interior angles always sum to 180 degrees, nor would any exhaustive search of pairs of integers convince us equally well that the square root of two really is irrational.

By exaggerating the accomplishments of Africans to a lay audience, the article is minimizing the accomplishments of Europeans.

Seems like this viewpoint is based on preconceived views of 'europeaness'. However agree in general that this articles claim of African fractals doesn't seems to be based more on geometric patterns that please they eye more than mathematical principles

> Mathematics proper, as in the derivation of theorems from axioms by means of proof

That is an extremely narrow definition [1]. It is acceptable to me as someone who works in the intersection of technology and mathematics -- but for the general public the word implies a wide field of study, exploration and usage.

For example, on Wikipedia "Mathematics (from Greek μάθημα máthēma, “knowledge, study, learning”) is the study of topics such as quantity (numbers), structure, space, and change."

So all the author is saying that the residents of Benin City seem to have studied fractal patterns in some form and used them in art.

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[1] Although, reading your comment more carefully, you did qualify it with "mathematics proper". I guess my comment's whole point is that it's often "mathematics improper" when used by a popular columnist.

Echoing other comments, the importance of "proof" in math has not been universal even in West. For example, the rigorous definition of derivatives[1] was not given until 1817, 130 years after Newton's Principia was published.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(%CE%B5,_%CE%B4)-definition_of...

What? No. There's way more examples, but the ones that most come to mind are the calendars of the Mayan and Incan civilizations. If that's not mathematics, what is it?

Slave trade kills cities and cultures.

Unfortunately although the practice is horrid, I dont see much to justify the claim

Back when the Brits were hell-bent on destroying the slave trade, being the capitol of a slave-trading culture was a good way to get destroyed.

Slave trade helped make Bristol and Liverpool prosperous, so it doesn't kill all cities.

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