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Bronze plate: ibis-like bird

This relief plate from the royal palace shows a long-billed wading bird. Birds have far-reaching symbolic meanings among the Edo: they stand for "witches" and other magically acting beings. As messengers, they connect heaven and earth (and in this case, water). The creation myth tells of a bird at the top of the "world tree" that gave a snail shell to the youngest of the three sons of the supreme god Olokun. When the three sons climbed down the world tree and found a vast expanse of water below, the sand that formed the first land in the primordial sea trickled out of this snail shell. The background of the plate is decorated with four-rayed rosettes. They stand for the cardinal points, the four times of day, the 4-day week then common in the south of today's Nigeria, and for the god Olokun. Text: Dietmar Neitzke.

Data Provider
Linden-Museum Stuttgart Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde
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Cataloguing data

Cultural attribution
Edo
Object type
Relief
Dimensions
Breite: 30 cm, Höhe: 43 cm
Material/Technique
Copper alloy
Lost wax process
Current location
Linden-Museum Stuttgart
Inventory number
005367

Provenance and sources

where
Nigeria

when
1899
Provenance
In October 1898, the Hamburg company "H. Bey & Co" offered the Berlin Ethnological Museum a Benin collection that came directly from Africa. However, due to a lack of funds, the entire collection could not be purchased and was therefore to be passed on to other interested parties. Felix von Luschan of the Berlin Museum therefore informed Karl Graf von Linden in November 1898, and offered him a right of first refusal. The Linden Museum then made 15,000 M available for the purchase of objects. The purchase price was paid by the Heilbronn entrepreneur Karl Knorr, which is why the collection became known as "Die Karl Knorr'sche Sammlung von Benin-Altertümern". Von Luschan published a detailed description of the collection under the same title (1901) on behalf of Count Linden and Knorr. Other buyers of the collection included the museums in Vienna and Munich, but also people such as Hans Meyer (Leipzig) and Eugen Rautenstrauch (Cologne). Text: Markus Himmelsbach.

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