The Nok Culture

The Nok culture is the earliest culture in Nigeria to be identified by its own distinctive artefacts. It is named after the village of Nok, in the Ham area of southern Kaduna State, where its terracotta sculptures were first found at a tin mine in 1928.

The two sources read date it differently. The Library of Congress country study places the Nok between the fourth century BC and the second century AD, in a large area above the confluence of the Niger and Benue rivers on the Jos Plateau. Wikipedia, drawing on more recent research, says the culture may have emerged around 1500 BCE and lasted until about 1 BCE, with the earliest terracotta sculptures perhaps made around 900 BCE. Both describe the Nok as ironworkers: the country study cites the furnaces at Taruga, dated to the fourth century BC, as the oldest evidence of metalworking in West Africa, and Wikipedia says iron metallurgy may have developed independently in the Nok culture between about 750 and 550 BCE.

The Nok are best known for their hollow, nearly life-size terracotta heads and figures, with detailed hairstyles, jewellery and stylised features. According to Wikipedia they are regarded as the earliest large figurative sculpture in Africa outside ancient Egypt; they were probably part of a complex funerary culture, and some show hunters with slings, bows and arrows, and people paddling a dugout canoe laden with goods. The country study praises the sculpture for both its artistic expression and its technical quality, and says the Nok reached a level of material development not repeated in the region for nearly a thousand years.

Much remains uncertain. Most sculptures survive only as fragments, many sites have been looted, and the origin of the Nok people is unknown; Wikipedia reports that researchers think a northern, Sahelian homeland most likely. It also notes suggestions that later West African art, including the sculpture of Ife and Benin, may continue the Nok terracotta tradition.

The country study calls the first millennium AD, after the Nok, a "silent millennium" about which little is known, apart from iron smelting on Dala Hill in Kano around 600–700 AD.