Six objects they said didn't exist
Gold coins, manuscripts, bronze and stone, all made long before anyone arrived to "discover" them. Each one answers a myth about Africa's past.
Aksumite Gold Coin
Aksum, in present-day Ethiopia and Eritrea, minted its own gold, silver and bronze coins from around the late 3rd century CE. It was one of the very few ancient states to issue gold coinage, and its traders reached from the Red Sea to India.
Read about Aksum →Bronze Head with Coral Collar
Benin’s royal brass-casters made heads like this to honour Obas and Queen Mothers, with collars of coral beads rising to the chin. In 1897 a British expedition looted thousands of these works. Many are still held in Western museums, and some have begun to come home.
Read about Kingdom of Benin →The Ishango Bone
Found near the source of the Nile, this baboon fibula with a quartz tip is carved with groups of notches. Some researchers read them as counting, others as a lunar calendar. Either way, it is one of the oldest mathematical objects ever found.
A Timbuktu Manuscript
Timbuktu’s family libraries hold hundreds of thousands of manuscripts on astronomy, law, medicine and mathematics. When armed groups occupied the city in 2012, librarians smuggled many of them south to safety in Bamako.
Read about Mali Empire →The Conical Tower
Inside the Great Enclosure stands a solid tower of fitted granite, roughly ten metres tall, built without a drop of mortar by ancestors of the Shona. Colonial writers insisted someone else must have built it. The evidence says otherwise.
Read about Great Zimbabwe →Nok Terracotta Head
Nok terracottas are among the oldest figurative sculptures in sub-Saharan Africa, known for their elaborate hairstyles and pierced, triangular eyes. They were made by a culture that was also smelting iron more than two thousand years ago.