WISH YOU WERE HERE
European travellers often wrote home about the wonders they’d seen in the medieval metropolis
1 CRUISE TO TIMBUKTU
Benin City lay deep inside the jungle, but it wasn’t cut off from other places. The River Niger connected it to Timbuktu, the capital of the wealthy Mali Emprie, and other African kingdoms in the north. The river also flowed south to the Atlantic Ocean, which is how Europeans sailed to the city.
3 DISCOVER THE OTHER GREAT WALL
Huge walls protected Benin City. The defensive fortifications included over 6,200 miles of earthen ramparts, some of which were over nine metres tall. As if that wasn’t enough, the walls were also encircled by a moat.
2 SEEING THE LIGHT
One of the first cities to have a semblance of street lighting, huge metal lamps fuelled by palm oil – one of the empire’s greatest exports – were placed all around the city, though especially near the royal residence, to illuminate traffic.
4 MIND-BOGGLING MATHEMATICAL DESIGN
While 16th-century visitors often described Benin City’s layout as disorganised, American mathematician Ron Eglash has suggested that the city’s architecture – from the arrangement of its districts to the design of its houses, and even individual rooms in those houses – carefully repeated the same symmetrical patterns.
5 TOUR THE RAINFOREST VILLAGES
Beyond the city limits, many people lived in villages in clearings in the jungle, farming yams, peppers and other vegetables as well as cotton. The French explorer Reynaud des Marchais noted how carefully the fields were cultivated in the 1720s, producing three to four harvests a year. In imitation of the city’s defences, many of these villages were ringed with protective moats.
8 SHOP IN THE ARTISAN MARKETS
Many of the city’s inhabitants were craftspeople who were organised into guilds. While the all-important brass casters’ guild worked exclusively for the Oba, Europeans purchased goods from the wood carvers, ivory carvers, leather workers, blacksmiths and weavers.
6 ROYAL PALACE
The grounds of the royal palace made up a great part of the whole city, with Dutch writer Olfert Dapper claiming it was the size of the Dutch town of Haarlem. It included the royal residence of the Oba, various reception courts, quarters for his courtiers and the royal harem. The main palace was square-shaped with a wood-shingled roof, and from the 17th century it was decorated inside with bronze plaques.
7 VISIT BENIN BROADWAY
According to Dapper, the first thing you saw on entering Benin was a 3.7-mile-long thoroughfare: “A great broad street, which is not paved and seems to be seven or eight times greater than Warmoesstraat in Amsterdam. The street is straight and does not bend at any point.” Each of the city’s nine gates led to broad streets like this, which criss-crossed the city.