THE LOST CITY OF BENIN
“Great Benin, where the king resides, is larger than Lisbon; all the streets run straight and as far as the eye can see,” Portuguese ship captain Lourenço Pinto wrote of Benin in 1691. “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.”
Located in the depths of the jungle but connected to other African kingdoms and the Atlantic Ocean by the Niger River, Great Benin City was the imperial capital of an empire that stretched from Lagos in the west to beyond the Niger in the east at its peak – an area that equates to approximately one-fifth of modern-day Nigeria.
Benin made contact with Europeans in the 1480s when Portuguese traders happened upon it while seemingly trying to find a way around the traditional Saharan trade routes. Dutch merchants arrived 100 years later, and over the next 200 years more traders came from England, France, Germany and Spain. They all returned home with amazing stories to rival Pinto’s. But if you mentioned
