In 1939 a labourer named Isaiah Anozie was digging a cistern in his compound at Igbo-Ukwu, a small village in present-day Anambra State, when his shovel struck a cache of bronzes. The objects — ceremonial bowls, pendants, fly-whisks, sword-hilts and a regalia of an unknown priestly office — were turned over to the British colonial administration and ended up partly in the National Museum, Lagos, partly in the British Museum.
It took two further excavations — by Thurstan Shaw in 1959 and 1964 — to establish what the find meant. Radiocarbon dating placed the bronzes in the 9th century CE: roughly 400 years older than the bronzes of Ife and 600 years older than the bronzes of Benin. They were produced by lost-wax casting of an extraordinary technical refinement — finer than anything contemporary in medieval Europe — using a leaded-tin bronze alloy whose copper was almost certainly imported via the trans-Saharan trade from the mines of Takedda in present-day Niger.
The implications were and remain controversial. The bronzes suggested that, contrary to the prevailing colonial-era assumption that west African metallurgical sophistication began with Ife in the 12th century, an Igbo ritual elite in the 9th century — three centuries before the founding of Nri and four centuries before Ile-Ife's classical period — was already commanding the labour, the imported copper, the alloy science and the cosmological framework necessary to produce regalia of imperial complexity. Shaw's interpretation, broadly accepted today, is that Igbo-Ukwu represents an early phase of the Eze Nri priestly office of the Kingdom of Nri.
The Igbo-Ukwu bronzes are now among the oldest surviving bronze castings made in Africa south of the Sahara. They are the empirical answer to anyone who still asks whether Igbo civilisation produced 'high art' before the colonial encounter. The answer is: by the 9th century, yes — and with a refinement that anticipated Ife by four hundred years.