Digital Benin

Digital Benin is an online platform that brings together objects, historical photographs, and documentation from collections worldwide to provide an overview of the royal artefacts from the Kingdom of Benin looted in the late nineteenth century. Following the British punitive expedition of 1897, thousands of objects were dispersed across museums and institutions.

The platform reconnects this fragmented corpus by aggregating data from over 5,000 objects held in more than 130 institutions across 21 countries and thousands of archival documents. It links digital records with oral histories, object research, historical context, and linguistic resources, offering a layered perspective on Benin arts, culture, and history.