Ile-Ife
500 CE – 1500 CE
Regarded by the Yoruba people as the spiritual birthplace of humanity and the sacred origin city of Yoruba civilization — a major West African urban centre that produced, between roughly the 12th and 15th centuries CE, some of the most technically accomplished bronze and terracotta portrait sculptures in world art. Their naturalism was so unexpected to early 20th-century European observers that it briefly spawned a discredited theory attributing them to a lost "Atlantean" or Greek colony rather than African artists.
Early MedievalMedievalHigh Medieval
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