The
Tale of Kings relates that the Nok expansion beyond the Jos Plateau began in 1286 BC and reached the Niger by 1265. This roughly agrees with the archaeological record: fairly soon after 1300, Nok official regalia and symbols of office begin appearing in Niger Valley villages as well as those immediately north of the Jos Plateau and east as far as Lake Chad. These would be the boundaries of the Nok Empire for the remainder of its history: the Niger to the west, the Benue to the south, the lake to the east and the desert to the north.
The era of military expansion would prove brief (although the wars would not), because the empire’s borders were natural ones. South of the Benue, horses died of malaria and a cavalry empire was impossible to maintain. Nor, unlike the Salt Road ponies, could cavalry horses survive long campaigns in the desert. By this time, also, the peoples of the Lower Niger had themselves learned the art of carbon steelmaking, and had begun to form defensive alliances and proto-states capable of resisting Nok armies at the ends of long supply lines. The lands beyond the border would become an increasingly important part of the Nok trade network, and would in many ways be part of its mercantile empire, but they would never come under its direct rule.
The Nok found themselves a minority within their new domain: the Niger Valley was less technologically advanced but more densely populated. As the fertile new provinces began to assimilate to Nok ways and the lords and chiefs who submitted were incorporated into the Nok nobility, they eclipsed the homeland as sources of troops and tax revenue. Inevitably, this meant that they would also eclipse the plateau in political importance.
The lowlands’ rise to prominence began with the foundation of Bio in about 1270 BC. Originally a military garrison, Bio grew quickly into a market town and center of regional government. After 1240, as the valley became the most economically important part of the empire, an increasing number of bureaucrat-griots and government offices moved there – and around 1220, so did the king.
The
Tale of Kings gives several reasons for the move, some of which are contradictory, but two stand out. The ruler of this time had been born on the Niger himself, and was a child of the old king by his marriage to a woman from a lowland kingmaker family. And there also appears to have been a split between the royal bureaucracy and the religious authorities in Duwa. By moving away from the plateau, the king hoped to break free of the secret societies’ influence and to achieve absolute rule.
It is not clear whether he succeeded – later passages from the
Tale of Kings tell of rulers making pilgrimages and consulting with the priesthood – but the shift of the capital proved permanent. Changes also start to show about this time in the Nok religion itself, also with the monarchy at its center. Earlier stories of capricious guardian spirits and an aloof creator deity began to be overlaid with new ones suggesting a more organized cosmology, in which the creator was king of the gods and ruled the ancestors the way the emperor ruled the living. The emperor was obviously identified with the creator, albeit not having divine status himself, and worship of that deity shifted from a shadowy secret cult to one involving public ceremony. It appears that during the later 13th and 12th centuries, there may have been two rival cults of the creator-deity, the original in Duwa and the royal one in Bio.
The assertiveness of the monarchy and its associated cults also showed in architecture and statuary, both of which became more monumental in scale. Bio was a new city without the historical or religious importance of Duwa, so the kings sought to lend it prestige by constructing lavish palaces and public buildings. Many terra-cotta figures of the king, his soldiers and the bureaucrats were also erected in the streets and plazas; these were not the figurines of earlier times but life-size or even larger. A visitor to the palace in the late 13th century was greeted by a veritable terra-cotta army standing guard over the approach, and had to pass other guardian figures of gods and fire-breathing horses before entering the king’s presence. The Nok Empire was an Iron Age rather than Bronze Age society, and thus never developed a palace economy, but by this time, politics were very much a palace affair.
Bio, located at the northernmost continuously navigable point on the Niger, also became a center for trade with the south. The third and greatest of the West African trade routes, the Palm Road, was well traveled by 1250 BC, with palm oil from the Niger Delta flowing north in exchange for steel implements and works of fine craftsmanship. Some merchants ranged still farther south to the Baka people of the mountains, and there they learned of
iboga, a plant whose bark, mixed with water, would give powerful visions. Dried iboga, and the ivory that came from trade with proto-Bantu peoples to the south and east, became prized commodities in the growing Nok cities, and both would feature in religious rites.
So valuable did foreign trade become that, by mid-century, the Nok had begun to establish colonies: on the western shore of Lake Chad, in the Niger Delta, and on the bend of the Niger where salt caravans came in from the desert. These towns, though not part of the empire proper and often eager to flout imperial edicts, became centers for transmission of Nok culture. They also provided further stimulus to state formation in the south, partly through example and partly by fueling fears of domination.
By about 1225, the forest regions west of the Niger Delta had coalesced into the kingdom of Asun, which was more of a tributary empire and military alliance than a centralized state but which could field a large army and control the local trade routes. Asun wood-carving reached a high level of workmanship – as high as Nok terra-cotta – and became a valuable trade item in its own right; also, in a preliterate age, wood panels were a means of keeping records. The throne of Bio at century’s end was an Asun-made hardwood stool carved with scenes from the reigns of each Nok king from Inadese onward, and panels on the doors of public buildings showed important episodes in the history of the kingdom or the cities in which they were located.
In the delta itself, a number of city-states grew up, which became known as the Palm Kingdoms. These “cities” were towns by Nok standards, with populations of 1500 to 4000 and few of the elaborate defensive works and public structures that characterized Nok centers, and they were dominated by the Nok trading colony of Ado to a greater extent than Asun was. Their artwork – which, like Asun’s, was wood – took on the characteristic poses and elongated features of Nok statuary, albeit portraying their own deities and particularly their creator-god Chukwu. [1]
But the trade route that would affect the Niger region most profoundly was neither of these. Instead, it was the one to the east, past Lake Chad into the Chari basin, where Nok merchants traded for ivory, hides and forest products. By the late 13th century, the Palm Road extended far beyond the lake, and Bantu market towns were growing up all along the Chari and Aouk. They would bring word to the Nok of a rich river valley still further east, dotted with kingdoms and cities, and from them, the peoples of that valley would learn of the Nok.
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[1] I’m probably cheating by assigning the modern Igbo name of God to the proto-Igbo, but then again, names of God tend to be durable.