纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 063伊费头像（6）（在线收听）

It's hard to exaggerate what a profound reversal of prejudice and hierarchy this represented. Along with Greece and Rome, Florence and Paris, now stood Nigeria. If you want an example of how "things" can change thought, then the impact of the Ife heads in 1939 are, I think, as good as you'll find.

Current research suggests that the heads that we know were all made over quite a short stretch of time, possibly in the middle of the fifteenth century. At that point Ife had for centuries been a leading political, economic and spiritual centre. It was a world of forest farming, dominated by cities that developed in the lands west of the Niger River. And it was river systems that connected Ife to the regional trade networks of West Africa, and to the great routes that carried ivory and gold across the Sahara to the Mediterranean coast. In return, came metals that would make the Ife heads. The world of the Mediterranean had provided not the artists, as Frobenius supposed, merely the raw materials.

The forest cities were presided over by their senior ruler, the Ooni of Ife. The ooni's role was not merely political, he also had a great range of spiritual and ritual duties. And the city of Ife has always been the leading religious centre of the Yoruba people. Still today there is an ooni who has high ceremonial status and moral authority, and whose headgear still echoes that of our sculpted head of about seven hundred years ago.