Did You Know?

The mediaeval Nigerian city of Benin was built to ‘a scale comparable with the Great Wall of China’. There was a vast system of defensive walling totalling 10 000 miles in all. Even before the full extent of the city walling had become apparent, the Guinness Book of Records carried an entry in the 1974 edition that described the city as: ‘The largest earthworks in the world carried out prior to the mechanical era.’