Ewuare the Great
Ewuare turned Benin from a city into an empire and built the earthworks that are among the largest structures raised anywhere before the machine age. He came to the throne about 1440 after a succession struggle and a period of exile, and the tradition holds that the city burned during it. What he built afterwards was deliberate: a walled capital laid out on a plan, broad streets, a palace complex, and a reorganised court in which hereditary chiefs were balanced against town chiefs appointed by the Oba. The walls are the part that is hard to take in. The ramparts and ditches of Benin City and the surrounding kingdom together run to thousands of kilometres of earthworks enclosing hundreds of settlements, and were estimated by one survey to represent more material moved than the Great Pyramid. He also fixed the succession. Benin had come apart in the struggle that brought him to the throne, and he established primogeniture and a formal title for the designated heir, who was given a town of his own to govern as an apprenticeship. The dynasty that resulted has continued to the present day. He expanded by war across the Niger delta and westward towards Lagos, and the empire he left ran for several hundred kilometres. The Portuguese arrived within two decades of his death and traded pepper, cloth and later slaves; Benin sold captives but refused for a long period to sell male slaves at all. The brass casting for which the kingdom is now known was court art, controlled by a guild working only for the Oba, and it recorded dynastic history in plaques mounted on the palace pillars. Most of it left in 1897, when a British punitive expedition burned the city and removed several thousand objects, which are still being argued over.
- Nationality: Edo
- Roles: head_of_state, royalty
