Marked Nok village, Kaduna

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

The Nok culture

In central Nigeria, the Nok people made striking terracotta figures and were among the first in West Africa to smelt iron. Most of what we know has come since the 2000s, because looting destroyed many sites first.

Place
Nok village, Kaduna · TarugaAfrica
Laid out as
A civilisationA society seen from the inside: its rulers, places, work, beliefs and daily life, laid out like the rooms of a house.
Lessons
5 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. ITin miners find a head
  2. IITerracotta people
  3. IIIIron in West Africa
  4. IVLooting and loss
  5. VWhat the sites show

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Bernard Fagg
  • Angela Fagg Rackham
  • Peter Breunig

Objects

  • Terracotta heads
  • Iron-smelting furnaces

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

1500 BC to AD 1. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?