29 Apr The Walls of Benin City was the world’s largest man-made earth structure.

I was startled when I heard about the Walls of Benin. It was considered the largest man-made structure lengthwise and was hailed as the largest earthwork in the world. That’s mind blowing! Seeing that Nigeria has such an outstanding historic fact that’s exclusive and unique, no country in any continent can counter it. Scientist figured out that it is larger than Sungbo’s Eredo as it enclosed 2,510 sq. miles (6,500 km²) of community lands. Its length was over 9,900 miles (16,000 km). I was wondering what the quality of the walls could be and how strong they are that they still remain strong to be discovered having been built since the 15^th century and then I discovered that the walls were a combination of ramparts and moats, called Iya in the local language, used as a defence of the defunct Kingdom of Benin, which is present-day Benin City, the capital of present-day Edo, Nigeria.

The walls are exclusively hard and it was estimated that earliest construction began in 800 and continued into the mid-15th century.

Now when you get to Edo State, you’d find out that scattered pieces of the structure remains there with vast majority of them being used by the locals for building purposes. As a matter of fact, what remains of the wall itself continues to be torn down for real estate developments.

I thought to myself why the government didn’t stop that.

What blew my mind the most is that the walls are four times longer than the Great Wall of China, and consumed a hundred times more material than the Great Pyramid of Cheops. Archaeologist said it took an estimated 150 million hours of digging to construct and are perhaps the largest single archaeological phenomenon on the planet, WOW!

ref: wikipedia