(ORDO NEWS) — Benin bronzes were produced from metal produced in Germany.
Benin bronzes refers to a collection of thousands of African works of art in the form of heads, tablets, figurines and other objects created by the Edo people of Nigeria between the 16th and 19th centuries AD.
The name “bronze” is misleading, because in reality these works of art are made of brass.
It is generally accepted that the metal for these sculptures was obtained from small brass rings, “manillas”, which were used as currency in European trade in West Africa.
However, there was no firm confidence in this due to the fact that scientists had few samples of genuine historical manillas.
Now, German scientists from the Georg Agricola Technische Hochschule have chemically analyzed 67 manillas recovered from five shipwrecks in the Atlantic and three landmasses in Europe and Africa.
The finds date back to the 16th-19th centuries. It turned out that there is a strong similarity between the composition of the metal of the Benin bronze and that of the manillas used in Portuguese trade before the 18th century, suggesting that these manillas were the main source of metal for the sculptures.
In addition, the composition of these rings indicates that they were produced from the ore of the Rhine basin (Germany), a major metallurgical center.
The constancy of the composition of the bronzes suggests that African blacksmiths were very selective about what metal they would use to create the figurines.
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