Under the Urhoto term on Digital Benib, one finds ivory heads of the Iy’Ọba alongside depictions of captives, court officials, and small figurines of various types. This Online Platform describes Urhoto as “altar tableau and altar rings” displayed on ancestral altars dedicated to the Iy’Ọba, who usually had an Urhoto in her shrine. Like the Ọba, after her death an altar was erected in her memory, decorated with objects representing her achievements. Urhotọ are placed among other typical altar objects—commemorative heads, bells, carved tusks—and often consist of a square or rectangular base with a central opening. The Iy’Ọba stands at the center, flanked by attendants and officials, with bases decorated in guilloche patterns and motifs such as elephant trunks, mudfish, or ram heads. Ring-shaped Urhotọ with elephants and leopards "also exist, often depicting sacrificial scenes, such as birds pecking at decapitated bodies.
While informative, this description also risks simplifying a fundamentally ritual category into an object-centered one. The Urhoto altar was not a display, but a space of action. Its objects were not illustrations but active participants in a constellation of power and presence. The Iy’Ọba, exemplified by Iy’ọba Idia, mother of Oba Esigie, was a female power figure whose artworks ensured the presence of ancestors, protected the dynastic line, and bound potentially destructive forces. In this context, depictions of captives are not out of place; they express the Iy’Ọba’s ambivalent authority, visualizing danger controlled and transformed into protective power.
The apparent contradiction between the altar and its diverse figures arises not from Benin practice itself but from how it is interpreted in museums and digital collections. Digital databases classify Urhoto as objects or contexts, inadvertently turning a functional, relational space into an iconographic category. For institutions like the MARKK, which critically address the legacies of colonial collecting, this highlights how ritual complexity can be flattened into metadata.
Understanding Urhoto as a ritual space rather than a display allows its logic to emerge: the objects interact functionally, and their diversity reflects the operational power of the Iy’Ọba. Seen this way, the captives are not anomalies but markers of the queen mother’s transformative strength. This perspective reminds us that Western classifications can obscure indigenous ontologies, and that decolonizing digital infrastructures requires attention not just to access, but to interpretation. For the MARKK and Digital Benin alike, Urhoto offers a lesson: the goal is not merely to explain Benin art, but to let its own categories guide understanding.
Footnote:
Urhotọ on Digital Benin
An Urhoto in the Wolfgang Jaenicke Gallery during the Benin-Ife Exhibition 2021, provenance Arnd Klinge, Potsdam.