Oba Esigie, the King of the Benin Kingdom from 1504 to 1550, made history as the first recorded Nigerian to speak a foreign language. He was said to have mastered Portuguese at a time when few ...

Around the top of the mask are the carved heads of Portuguese merchants.These are symbols of the kingdom’s power and wealth through trade. Benin was famous for its craft workers. Specialists in ...

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Edo people of the Kingdom of Benin, which controlled ... which were traded by the Portuguese; a later style called Birmingham manillas, which ...

The Edo people established this kingdom in present-day Edo State, and it became a wealthy and powerful entity before the arrival of European explorers. The Obas (rulers) of Benin wielded immense ...

The Museum of Fine Arts will close its Benin Kingdom Gallery on April 28, the museum announced Tuesday. The gallery opened in 2013 after the MFA accepted works lent from the collection of Robert Owen ...

Because many of the sculptures had been originally plundered in a bloody British raid in 1897, the MFA subsequently sought a deal to transfer title to the Kingdom of Benin in exchange for a long ...

The royal leader of the Kingdom of Benin sought the return of artifacts displayed at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The collector who owned them took them back instead. By Colin Moynihan and Tom ...

For more than a decade, a collection of masterful works from the West African Kingdom of Benin have held pride of place at the Museum of Fine Arts, in a dedicated gallery just off the museum’s ...