Posted on 08/22/2009 11:10:05 AM PDT by BGHater
Some 2,500 years ago, a mysterious culture emerged in Nigeria. The Nok people left behind bizarre terracotta statues -- and little else. German archaeologists are now looking for more clues to explain this obscure culture.
Half a ton of pottery shards is piled on the tables in Peter Breunig's workroom on the sixth floor of the University of Frankfurt am Main. There are broken pots, other storage vessels, a clay lizard and fragments of clay faces with immense nostrils.
The chipped head of a statue depicts an African man with a moustache, a fixed glare and hair piled high up on his head. He looks gloomy, almost sinister. Just a few days ago, the ceramics traveled 8,000 kilometers (5,000 miles) by sea from Nigeria, where they were unearthed.
Breunig runs an excavation near the Nigerian highlands of Jos, where the mysterious Nok culture once blossomed. Spanning more than 80,000 square kilometers (31,000 square miles), the tropical region they lived in was larger than Ireland. Its inhabitants lived in wooden huts and ate porridge made from pearl millet. Some women subjected themselves to bloody "scar ornaments" scratched into their breasts with knives.
The mysterious Nok culture lived in a large area of modern-day Nigeria around 2,500 years ago. Peter Breunig, an archaeologist from the University of Frankfurt am Main, is trying to unearth the secrets of their culture.
Exploring the culture is difficult: The Nok left no writings, and almost all traces of their culture have disappeared.
All that remains are thousands of pottery shards and clay figures. The sculptures have become extremely popular in the art world -- and business has boomed for treasure hunters and illicit traders.
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
Thanks!
Wrong threat, sir.
The Nok were beset by, what at the time was known as the “neo sharers”. The “What yours is mine, what’s mine is mine too, gimme gimme, let me kill you for having what I don’t” mindset.
And, of course, with the “all opinions are equal” rule, the poor Nok were defenseless against their own folk who fell into that program of indoctrination, since the program and its indoctrination had no reliance on actual true fact, had no relationship to functional reality and was advanced, advocated and preached by those who had no integrity, honor or ability to relate cause to effect over time.
The neo sharers were immune to reason, argument and protected from debate by a complete lack of critical thinking skills.
The neo sharers then, as now, were a greater threat to the existence of the Nok than the religious murder/death cult a few tribe lands away that was also causing them grief at the time.
;)
The government at the time (2,500 years ago) instituted a “teracotta trade”, artificial market with the expectation that people engaged in making teracotta statues and trading in those statues would not be engaged in “climate changing” activities like farming and herding.
The NOK culture is famous as the originator of the NOK NOK jokes which swept around the world.
One theory about the disappearance of the NOKs occurred when neighboring tribes, tired of the inanities raided NOK villages and said:
Nok, NOK
Who’s there?
Destroyer
Destroyer who?
Destroyer whole tribe, bozos.
What ? No wheel ? No multi story buildings? No indoor plumbing ?..
Oh Sorry---that was the folks to the Nok's North...sumtim called the Club Med...Minoans and their like....
“Nok Nok!”
Who’s there?
Kenya.
Kenya who?
Kenya show us your birth certificate?
:’)
In spite of the “junk,” from an aesthetic perspective, I think there is a certain elegance and modernity about the lines of that statute.
different cultures consider different body-parts to be 'private'.
The 3 stooges? ( nyuk nyuk )
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