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The Great Walls of Benin today Edo, Nigeria ?? were a series of more than 500 interconnected earth walls (Edo: Iya) in the area around present-day Benin City.
They extended for some 16,000 km in all, took an estimated 150 million hours of digging to construct and were perhaps the largest single man made site on the planet in the absence of modern Earthmoving machines. This wall was destroyed to the ground by the British and their allies.
Respect and Honour to Great Benin Ancestors
The Walls of Benin are a series of earthworks made up of banks and ditches, called Iya in the Edo language, in the area around present-day Benin City, the capital of present-day Edo, Nigeria. They consist of 15 km (9.3 mi) of city iya and an estimated 16,000 kilometres (9,900 miles) of rural iya in the area around Benin.[1] 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.[2] Some estimates suggest that the walls of Benin may have been constructed between the thirteenth and mid-fifteenth century CE[3] 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.[5] 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 Europe
The Benin City walls have been known to Europeans since about 1500, when Portuguese explorer Duarte Pacheco Pereira briefly described the walls during his travels:
This city is about a league long from gate to gate; it has no wall but is surrounded by a large moat, very wide and deep, which suffices for its defence.
The archaeologist Graham Connah suggests that Pereira was mistaken with his description by saying that there was no wall. Connah says, “[Pereira] considered 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:
At the gate where I entered on horseback, I saw a very high bulwark, very thick of earth, with a very deep broad ditch, but it was dry, and full of high trees… That gate is a reasonable good gate, made of wood in their manner, which is to be shut, and there always there is watch holden.
Description
Benin in 1897
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.
Ethnomathematician Ron Eglash has discussed the planned layout of the city using fractals 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.”
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Scholarly Praise For the Great Wall of Africa
As a contemporary of Dr. Yosef Ben-Jochannan (Dr. Ben) and Dr. John Henrik Clarke, I spent many years traveling throughout the African continent. I still vividly remember the trips that I took to West Africa’s Nigeria with Dr. John Henrik Clarke. I also spent a considerable amount of time in Egypt and libraries entrenched in the history and culture of Africa. Yet, so many aspects of African history often get missed or are relegated to the periphery of the history of the continent. Maurice Miles Martinez has uncovered yet another gem of African history that has long been overlooked. This book tells a story that is so important to the history of our people, but that has been absent from the history books. The Great Wall of Africa or Great Wall of Benin is equally as important as other monumental works of construction on the continent. It rivals the breadth of the pyramids in Egypt and kept the Kingdom of Benin out of the grasp of European colonizers until modern times. This history book places the dynasties of the Benin Obas (Kings) into perspective and discusses the Bronzes that they created. Martinez artfully places Africans at the center of the story.
–Bert Green, Ph.D. Herbert H. Lehman College of the City University of New York
What is the Great Wall of Africa?
Nestled in the southern section of modern-day Nigeria are the remnants of a civilization so vast that one of its crowning achievements has never been matched by any civilization that has existed on the planet—including all modern societies. Archeologically known as the Ancient Linear Earthworks of Benin and Ishan, the Great Wall of Africa, also known as the Great Wall of Benin is almost 10,000 miles long and at some points reaches almost 60 feet in height. Even though it holds a place in the 1982 Guinness Book of World Records as the most massive structure that has ever been constructed, almost no one outside of a select few archeologists and specialists has heard of its enormous breadth. This book attempts to change that forever.
The Great Wall of Africa or Great Wall of Benin actually consists of a series of linear earthworks, many of them circular, some straight, some which stand on their own, and others that interconnect across a large area of Southern Nigeria. The Great Wall of Africa, like the Great Wall of China, is not a single wall, but a series of separate walls. Until the writing of this book, and another that I authored called: The Real Wakandas of Africa: Dr. John Henrik Clarke vs. Herman Cain, the Great Wall of Africa, which stretches 9,941 miles long, was known popularly among African scholars as the Walls of Benin. However, as I shall show, like the Great Wall of China, they were created by a single civilization, and therefore, constitute one major wall system.
The Great Wall of Africa consists of the Great Walls of Benin which are called Iya by the Bini people. The Great Wall of Benin contains more than 100 times the material of the Great Pyramid of Egypt (Pharaoh Khufu’s Pyramid). This is no minor feat because the Great Pyramid is a massive structure, containing more stone than 30 Empire State buildings. In all, more than 9.1 billion cubic feet of earth was used to build the Great Wall of Benin over an 800-year time period. The average height of each wall is 3 meters or just under 10 feet high, however, some of the Iya tower almost 60 feet in height (18 meters). This massive effort took more than 150 million man-hours to construct. Simply put, if all of the material was taken from all of the buildings on New York City’s borough of Manhattan there would not be enough substance to build the Great Wall of Africa. The Great Wall of Africa contains more material than all of the financial district’s buildings, all of midtown Manhattan’s buildings, and all of uptown Manhattan’s buildings (Harlem) combined.
Interesting facts about the Great Walls of Benin in Nigeria, one of the world’s largest man-made earth structures
The Great Walls of Benin
It may not be as famous as the Great Wall of China, but it was at one time in history the largest man-made structure in the world.
Constructed over a period of 600 years, the Great Walls of Benin was located at the southern border of the defunct Benin Kingdom, which was one of the oldest and most highly developed states in West Africa.
For the over 400 years the Walls existed, it protected the inhabitants of the kingdom, particularly, the traditions and civilisations of the Edo people, until it was ravaged in 1897 by the British.
What else is there to know about this amazing structure?
The walls, which are four times longer than the Great Wall of China, are a combination of strong materials like ramparts and moats, which predated the use of modern earth-moving equipment and technology, and were used for defensive purposes.
Construction work on the wall began around 800 AD and ended mid-1400.
Archaeologists say it took an estimated 150 million hours of digging by local people to construct the wall and the structure is considered as the largest single archaeological phenomenon on earth.
The Great Walls of Benin was estimated to extend for about 16,000 km in length; both the exterior and interior walls.
It occupied a land mass of 6,500 km2, which is about 37 percent of the present land mass of Edo State.
View of Benin City before British conquest — GlobalSecurity.org
Less than 500 years after the completion of the Great Wall, the British ravaged the walls in what has come to be known as the Punitive Expedition. This expedition was said to have destroyed more than a thousand years of Benin history and one of the earliest evidence of African civilization.
Currently, scattered pieces of the structure remain in Edo, with locals using some of these pieces for building purposes.
Parts of the walls are also being torn down for real estate developments.
In 1995, the historical structure was added to the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List in the cultural category.
Though in ruins now, its existence continues to evoke memories of the once wealthy, powerful and industrious kingdoms that ever lived in African history.