A Benin bone pendant

A Benin bone pendant, southern Nigeria, region of Benin City. Signs of age.

This carved bone pendant depicting a ram reflects the sophisticated symbolic vocabulary associated with the historic Kingdom of Benin. Ram imagery in Benin court art is commonly linked to strength, sacrificial potency, and controlled aggression—qualities aligned with royal authority and ritual legitimacy.

The horns, rendered laterally in geometric abstraction, emphasize balance and symmetry. Their stylization transforms the animal into a heraldic sign, consistent with Edo preferences for formal clarity and emblematic compression.

Particularly notable is the treatment of the mouth as an interlaced motif. This design, repeated symmetricallyin a doubled form on both cheeks, suggests continuity, cyclical force, and regenerative power. In Edo visual logic, interlace patterns often evoke ideas of unbroken lineage, enduring sovereignty, and the perpetual renewal of spiritual authority.

Bone as material reinforces themes of durability and ancestral presence and it may have functioned as personal insignia, protective amulet, or marker of affiliation with courtly ideology. The geometric reduction of the ram, combined with the doubled interlace motif, situates the object within a broader Benin aesthetic characterized by rhythmic symmetry, emblematic clarity, and the condensation of cosmological meaning into compact, wearable form.

CAB33694

Height: 9 cm
Weight: 43 g