From Trader to Priest in Two Hundred Years: The Transformation of a Foreign Figure on Benin Ivories

Abstract

In museums and private collections throughout Europe and America there are impressive holdings of antique bronzes and ivories from the Kingdom of Benin, in Nigeria (see map). The largest of these objects are elephant's tusks three to seven feet long and elaborately carved with rows of figures, animals, and other motifs in high relief (Fig. 1). The tusks were created as furnishings for altars of various types in Benin City, and they were carved by the Igbesanmwan, the royal ivory carvers' guild in the palace of the Oba, or hereditary king. From the eighteenth century onwards European visitors to the Oba's palace have commented on the profusion of these ivories in shrines that the kings maintained in honor of their royal predecessors. In the palace each tusk was supported by a bronze pedestal in the form of a crowned head, the tusk rising from the center like an extension of the crown (Fig. 2). Similar carved tusks have been noted on domestic shrines of high-ranking eighteenth- and nineteenth-century chiefs.