The Yoruba creation narrative, recited at the installation of every Oba, holds that Olodumare sent Obatala from heaven to fashion the world, that Obatala became drunk on palm wine, and that the task fell to Oduduwa, who descended at Ile-Ife with a chain, a five-toed cockerel and a calabash of earth, and founded the first kingdom of mankind. From Oduduwa's sons and grandsons — Olowu of Owu, Onisabe of Sabe, Orangun of Ila, Owa Obokun of Ilesha, Alaketu of Ketu, Alake of Egba, Alafin of Oyo, Oba of Benin, and others — descend the principal Yoruba ruling houses, each of which retains an Ife-origin beaded crown (ade) whose veil distinguishes it from the lesser unbeaded crowns of non-Oduduwa rulers.
The historical Ile-Ife was a substantial urban centre by the 11th century, ringed by city walls and devoted to the production of glass beads at the Olokun grove (excavated by Frank Willett in the 1950s and Akin Ogundiran from the 1990s) and to the casting of bronze heads of breathtaking naturalism — the heads of the 'Ife dynasty,' rediscovered by the German ethnographer Leo Frobenius in 1910 and dated by thermoluminescence to between the 12th and 14th centuries. Their realism so disturbed Frobenius that he proposed an Atlantean origin; subsequent scholarship by William Fagg, Frank Willett and Suzanne Blier has firmly established them as the work of indigenous Yoruba master-casters working in lost-wax technique on locally smelted alloy.
The Ooni of Ife was — and remains — the ritual head of Yorubaland: not its military or political overlord (that role passed to the Alafin of Oyo from the 16th century until the empire's collapse in 1837), but the spiritual sovereign whose blessing every Yoruba Oba must seek. The Alaafin and the Oba of Benin both send tribute and emissaries to Ife at the Olojo Festival and at every coronation. The British in 1903 forcibly relocated the Ooni Adelekan Olubuse I to Lagos to settle a dispute with the Alake of Abeokuta; the colonial record acknowledged Ife's primacy by the title 'Oba of Yorubaland'.
Ile-Ife today, in Osun State, retains its 401 traditional shrines, the Opa Oranmiyan (a granite obelisk associated with Oranmiyan, founder of the Oyo dynasty), and the Museum of Ife Antiquities (1954) — though many of the original Ife bronzes are dispersed across the British Museum, the Rietberg Museum in Zürich, and the Yemisi Shyllon Museum in Lagos.