For what it’s worth, Nassim Nicholas Taleb has claimed that Beirut has probably been destroyed and rebuilt about six times over the last 5,000 years or more but is still basically in the same place. (I would verify this, but you see his point).

Most of Sub-Saharan Africa seems different in this way. The Yoruba are famous for their urbanism, yet the urban system now is different from what it was 200 years ago — basically shifted south during the Yoruba Wars and reached its current arrangement by the time the British Protectorate was fully established.

African cities seem to have existed based on long-distance trade, more so than the existence of “durable cultural hearths” of intense settled agriculture. When the long distance trade networks shift, the cities move.

Land tended to be less valuable than people, in general. “Property” and “resource control” focus on people (slavery, serfdom, kinship) not ownership of land.

Jeffrey Herbst’s book is still worth reading, especially the literature review in early chapters: States and power in Africa, now in a 2d edition.

The late Colin McEvedy’s last book [Cities of the Classical World] was a gazetteer of ancient cities. It would be interesting to see a comparable work on Sub-Saharan Africa. I think there would more sites, percentage wise, that are abandoned and about which little is known. McEvedy (I think) relied in part on literary sources. And we don’t have literary sources on Sub-Saharan Africa for 2,000 years ago.

Consider Mesopotamia as a counterexample to Africa. Nineveh was destroyed, a pile of ruins, by the time Xenophon’s expedition moved past it, chronicled in Anabasis. Yet we know a lot about Nineveh now, mostly based on archeology done in the last 150 years. Clay tablets, often kiln fired by destruction, buried under sand for 2000 + years, then made to yield information.

Unlike the rest of the world, Africans never experienced the Malthusian limits because they were always in competition with mega-fauna (e.g. elephants, lions, leopards, etc.).

The World History curriculum is supposed to improve Americans’ knowledge of the non-Western world–how much it helps is an empirical question.

Benin City, the capital of Edo State, is a bit off the beaten path, though it’s by no means remote or hard to get to. The metro area probably has a population of 1 or 2 million people. Few foreigners end up in Benin City by accident.

Many educated foreigners probably confuse the Republic of Benin (the old French colony of Dahomey) with Benin, the city, which is in Edo State (one of 36 states) in a different country, present day Nigeria–the mind just gives up. The world has moved on. Who cares about this stuff? And there aren’t even ruins — just stories of a past glory. Written by… the Portuguese?

Much of what is written about Nigeria is “Wazobian” or dominated by the “big three groups” (Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa). The Bini people are not one of the big three.

The Edo speaking people who live in the larger area around the area of Benin City are (it seems to me offhand) fragmented politically, and don’t all look warmly toward the glories of ancient Benin, just as the Celts would not glorify the Roman Empire. Many of the people in the larger area don’t identify as Bini but as Ishan, Urhobo, or something else. I think.

So, I would hazard a guess that some of the neighbors of the Bini people view the ancient city as largely predatory rather than benign. Peter Ekeh (an Urhobo scholar) has written of this — and probably other scholars as well.

And, Benin City was a shadow of itself when it was sacked by the British in the punitive expedition of 1897. The Europeans were startled and impressed by the bronzes, which ended up in European museums. And the accusations of human sacrifice did not give the Kingdom a good name.

People do hear about the Benin bronzes in a good art curriculum that covers sculpture and pre-industrial crafts. A good exhibit of them was at the Chicago Art Institute sometime in the last ten years (2008?).

Much of the art came on loan from museums in Central Europe. The exhibit had a some decent ethnographic information on kingship and tradition, including commemorative cloth featuring the installation of 20th century obas (monarchs), etc.

As the article notes, the walls were mud. It rains a lot. Most mud walls wash away in the heavy rains of Southern Nigeria unless they are continually maintained. If you have no walls, you have no present awe-inspiring sight.

Similarly, Old Oyo (of the Oyo Empire in Yorubland) is ruins. The new city, Oyo town, is a relocation. Old Oyo is mostly ruins within a forest reserve away from the main roads. And the press of old Oyo is uneven as well–consult Reverend Samuel Johnson’s _History of the Yoruba_ and judge for yourself.

P.S.: Connah’s African Civilizations is not a bad place to start for information on the urban traditions of West Africa and the archeological studies thereof. Sorry to be prolix.

It’s interesting that the Portuguese were impressed, but aside from that, I don’t know that this was a spectacular medieval city.

Certainly Africans engineered some outstanding buildings – there is an area that was frequently raided by light cavalry, so the African residents built skyscrapers that could resist cavalry raids. That sort of thing impresses me more than Benin.