For more than five hundred years, the artists of the West African kingdom of Benin in Nigeria created outstanding works of art mainly in brass and ivory for use in divine kingship rituals, to adorn the royal palace, and identify the King, chiefs, warriors, and other officials at court.
The art of ivory has always been an exclusive privilege of Benin royalty and very delicately carved ivory scepters have an ancient history going back to the Golden Era of this ancient kingdom. They been catalogued either as scepters, flywhisks, staffs, idiophones or clappers.
The aim of this short note is to establish a corpus of these works of art and explain the various hypothesis on their iconography.
