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The Benin Moat (Edo: Iyanuwo), [1] also known as the Benin Iya, or Walls of Benin, are a series of massive earthworks encircling Benin City in Nigeria's Edo State. These moats have deep historical roots, with evidence suggesting their existence before the establishment of the Oba monarchy. Construction began around 800 AD and continued until ...
The city is known to be surrounded by wide inner walls made of earthwork and moats. In the 1974 edition of the Guinness Book of Records, it described the Benin City walls as the largest earthwork carried out before the Mechanical period. [1] Part of the walls were believed to be about 65 ft (20 m) tall. [2]
A series of walls marked the incremental growth of the city from 850 AD until its decline in the 16th century. To enclose his palace he commanded the building of Benin's inner wall, and 11-kilometre-long (7 mi) earthen rampart girded by a moat 6 m (20 ft) deep. This was excavated in the early 1960s by Graham Connah. Connah estimated that its ...
Generally, these are referred to as city walls or town walls, although there were also walls, such as the Great Wall of China, Walls of Benin, Hadrian's Wall, Anastasian Wall, and the Atlantic Wall, which extended far beyond the borders of a city and were used to enclose regions or mark territorial boundaries.
Within the walls were villages separated by fields, several royal palaces, a market-place and a large square containing the barracks. The average thickness of the walls was about 0.5 m (1 + 1 ⁄ 2 ft), which maintained cool temperatures inside the palace rooms. [13] Each palace had a distinct design to suit the whims of the kings.
The Walls of Benin City were the world's largest man-made structure. [85] Fred Pearce wrote in New Scientist : They extend for some 16,000 kilometres in all, in a mosaic of more than 500 interconnected settlement boundaries.
The Benin Expedition of 1897 was a punitive expedition by a British force of 1,200 men under Sir Harry Rawson. ... the abdominal wall being cut in the form of a cross ...
The walls are built of a ditch and dike structure, the ditch dug to form an inner moat with the excavated earth used to form the exterior rampart. [citation needed] The Benin Walls were ravaged by the British in 1897. Scattered pieces of the walls remain in Edo, with material being used by the locals for building purposes.