<< Other Photo Pages >> Ikom Monoliths - Standing Stones in Nigeria

Submitted by Andy B on Saturday, 05 January 2008  Page Views: 47325

Neolithic and Bronze AgeSite Name: Ikom Monoliths Alternative Name: Alok Ikom Stone Monoliths
Country: Nigeria
NOTE: This site is 1171.395 km away from the location you searched for.
Type: Standing Stones

Latitude: 6.000000N  Longitude: 8.500000E
Condition:
5Perfect
4Almost Perfect
3Reasonable but with some damage
2Ruined but still recognisable as an ancient site
1Pretty much destroyed, possibly visible as crop marks
0No data.
-1Completely destroyed
 3 Ambience:
5Superb
4Good
3Ordinary
2Not Good
1Awful
0No data.
 no data Access:
5Can be driven to, probably with disabled access
4Short walk on a footpath
3Requiring a bit more of a walk
2A long walk
1In the middle of nowhere, a nightmare to find
0No data.
 no data Accuracy:
5co-ordinates taken by GPS or official recorded co-ordinates
4co-ordinates scaled from a detailed map
3co-ordinates scaled from a bad map
2co-ordinates of the nearest village
1co-ordinates of the nearest town
0no data
 3

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Ikom Monoliths
Ikom Monoliths submitted by KaiHofmann : Ikom monolith, Calabar Museum, December 2006 Site in Nigeria Image copyright: Jeremy Weate, hosted on Flickr and displayed under the terms of their API. (Vote or comment on this photo)
Standing Stones in Cross River State, South Nigeria. Akwasnshi/Atal as the monolith is called among the Ejagham people of the Cross River State are distributed among over thirty communities. In each community, the stones are found in circles, sometimes perfect circles, facing each other standing erect, except where they have been tampered with by weather or man.

In some cases, the stones are found in the center of the village or in the central meeting place of the village elders, as in the case of Alok and Agba communities. In Etinan and Nabrokpa communities, the stones are located in an area of uncultivated forest outside the villages. The majority of the stones are carved in hard, medium-textured basaltic rock, a few are carved in sandstone and shelly limestone. The common features of the monoliths are that they are hewn into the form of a phallus ranging from about three feet in height to about five and half feet and are decorated with carvings of geometric and stylized human features, notably two eyes, an open mouth, a head crowned with rings, a stylized pointed beard, an elaborately marked navel, two decorative hands with five fingers, a nose, various shape of facial marks.

The stone monoliths of Alok Ikom bear a form of writing and a complex system of codified information. Although they seem to share the same general features, each stone, like the human finger print, is unique from every other stone in its design and execution.

The geometric images on the monoliths suggest that their makers possessed more than a basic knowledge of mathematics, not only because they are geometric, but also because of the obvious implication that there were computations and numbers on the layout of the stones.
Comparison with other similar properties

The Ikom monoliths with their geometric inscriptions could be compared to the rock Arts of Tanzania. The meanings of the codified symbol are known to only the artists. These are also associated with their origin, which is like most rock art works in Africa. Ikom monoliths could be West Africa's answer to United Kingdom's Stonehenge.

They are similar in arrangement and ordering to the Stone circuits in the Gambia, but unique in their complexity of design and interpretation.

Can you help us add the locations of specific monolith sites, please use our 'Add a Site' form to submit each location, and to add photos.

Note: Nigerian bloggers rave about their megaliths, see comment. Can you help us locate some of the sites?
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"Ikom Monoliths" | Login/Create an Account | 3 News and Comments
  
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Ikom monoliths to change status of Cross River by Andy B on Monday, 07 January 2008
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Friday, October 28, 2005 Tourism for Development
Adekunle Adekoya

In earlier editions of this page, and also in this column, pictures of carved stone monoliths from Alok have been published, as well as legends surrounding cotton trees planted at age grade initiation rites in the village of Alok, in the Ikom area of Cross River State. However recent work by Dr. Catherine Acholonu on the Ikom monoliths present a different vista that, when completed, along with relevant formalities and protocols on the global stage, will permanently change the status of Cross River and re-position that state as a prime tourist destination.

In short, the gist of Dr. Acholonu's work is the unearthing of a linkage between Calabar and the ancient port city of Tilmun, mentioned in archaeological and anthropolical works. The key is in the deciphering of the inscriptions on the monoliths which unspringed an ancient orthography of the type used in the civilisation of Tilmun. I hereby present extracts from a letter from Dr. Acholonu to the Cross River State Governor, Dr. Duke on her works, titled "Completion of the Ikom monoliths project and request for audience to present our findings to the state.

"Your Excellency, after four years of toiling and searching through mountains of material, ancient writings, mythologies, artifacts, ancient scriptures, libraries, anthropological records from the five continents of the globe, I am elated to report that on the 24th July 2005 with the aid of my Indian colleague, Engr Ajay Prabhakar, an IT consultant and computer scientist, I was able to decipher the ancient writings on the Cross River Monoliths. What we saw was beyond words. The work is slow and tedious. But we found that the inscriptions contain the names of Gods of Egypt and Babylon. We have matched the monoliths inscriptions with the Hebrew Cabbala and found more than ample evidence that the latter is modeled on the former.

"Induced by these findings we ranged through the materials we had gathered from ancient records of Egypt, Babylon, Akkadia etc., and we found, with more than ample proof, that the Nigeria/Cameroon axis was the seat of an ancient sacred city of the gods known in all ancient texts as Tilmun. As recorded in ancient Egyptian and Babylonian texts, Tilmun was the Holy City-of the ancients around 11,000 B.C. It was built with an underground system of tunnels which was regularly visited by Egyptian kings on pilgrimage because Tilmun was famous as the Land of the Gods or the Land of the Living. Its sea port was the most famed sea port in antiquity for it supplied the Old World with gold, copper, iron, palm produce, etc from the interior lands of Africa.

"Anthropologists, Archeologists and ethnographers from all over the world have been falling over themselves for decades, trying to find Tilmun. They have tried to locate it in the Middle East, even though the evidence they provide as proof is insufficient. But you know that even in academics there is politics. They have chosen the Middle Eastern city of Bayrein as the location of ancient Tilmun and now tourists from all over the world are flocking to that city as a result of that false claim.
"HOWEVER, OUR RESEARCH HAS PROVED BEYOND ALL DOUBT THAT TILMUN IS LOCATED IN THE NIGERIA/CAMEROON AXIS AND THAT THE FAMOUS SEA PORT OF TILMUN CELEBRATED IN ALL THE WRITINGS OF THE ANCIENTS WAS THE CALABAR SEA PORT ON THE SHORE OF THE ATLANTIC OCEAN. CALABAR WAS THE ROME AND THE MECCA OF ANTIQUITY: IT WAS THE HOLY CITY OF THE PHARAOHS FASHIONED BY THE. SAME GODS THAT RULED EGYPT WHOSE REIGN ENDED IN 3,000 B.C.
"WE ALSO FOUND THAT THE QUA PEOPLE, THE FIRST INHABITANTS OF CALABAR, ARE OF THE DIRECT LINEAGE OF CANAAN WHOSE NAME IS SPELT ‘QA-IN’ IN HEBREW(Emphases hers).

"This is just the tip of the iceberg. Our findings are, to say the least, earth-shattering! And everything is based on facts and scientific procedures."
Dr. Catherine Acholonu is Country Ambassador fo

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    Re: Ikom monoliths to change status of Cross River by Anonymous on Friday, 02 July 2010
    This is Catherine Acholonu. Indeed we have completed our work on the monoliths and other ancient civilizations around them, notably Igbo Ukwu - a LOST CITY the British archaeologist who excavated it conveniently forgot to mention. New excavations in Nok by a German university team of archaeologists reveal STONE WALLS that also indicate another lost city. What cities were these and who were these people who wrote letters on stone in times immemorial? History is about to change course, dear people. Many basic questions about the monoliths and who created them, for what purpose, when and how, are at last answered. We have come out with three major publications since we began this research on Africa's Prehistory in 1990. Our monolith work began in 2001. Three volumes of literature and images totalling over 1,500 pages are now available to the world to read and know who our ancestors were and how West Africa was the original Egypt of Osiris/Rama/Thoth and Isis. Like we suspected from the beginning, our findings are earth-shattering. Our first book in the trilogy (THE GRAM CODE OF AFRICAN ADAM) won me and my colleague the awards of a Professorship and a Doctorate (respectively) from a USA University. The second book (THEY LIVED BEFORE ADAM) won the 2009 International Book Awards in USA recently. The third (THE LOST TESTAMENT OF THE ANCESTORS OF ADAM) about to be released, is the concluding part of the trilogy, and it is packed full with research results that will surely bring about the rewriting of History as we know it. Our books are sold on Amazon and Paypal. We invite all to feast on lost knowledge recovered. Catherine Acholonu.
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Nigerian bloggers rave about their megaliths by Andy B on Saturday, 05 January 2008
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AFP writes: For the past couple of years, these mysterious circles of carved stone figures, which villagers in southern Nigeria still worship on occasion, have been causing a frenzy of excitement here.

Newspapers have trumpeted the Ikom monoliths - phallic-shaped pieces of volcanic rock largely ignored for centuries - as being remnants of a glorious civilization made up in equal parts of Ancient Egypt and the Old Testament.

One theory even cites them as evidence that the biblical Garden of Eden lay in what is now Nigeria.

Nigerian bloggers have been waxing lyrical about a "high technology civilization based in the present-day location of the Sahara desert". This civilization, whose "hallmarks included the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid of Egypt", was "decimated by the deluge and by the war of the gods of antiquity".

The stones themselves, which stand between 1 and 1.8 metres (3 and 5 feet) high, and which are laid out in some 30 circles in and around Alok village in Cross River State, are intriguing rather than awe-inspiring.

They were recently added to the World Monuments Fund's (WMF) list of sites in danger and are on the "tentative" list for possible inclusion in UNESCO's World Heritage Site list.

If included they would be Nigeria's third site, after Sukhur and the Sacred Forest of Osun.

The most immediate threats to the stones are erosion, exposure to humidity, heavy rainfall and extreme heat and sun, damage from falling trees and theft and vandalism, WMF says.

In the state capital Calabar giant versions of the stones - 20 or 30 times the size of the originals - were constructed last year to decorate a roundabout.

The population knows they come from "somewhere after Ikom", a town several hours? drive to the north.

"The people up there used to worship them; sometimes they still do," ventures a local resident called Wisdom, viewing one of the original stones in the garden of Calabar museum.

But even 20 or 30 kilometres outside Alok, ask for the "big grey stones" and all you will get is a blank look.

Only a cousin of Alok's Chief Sylvanus Ekoh Akong, located by chance at a makeshift roadside bar, was able to show the way.

Chief Sylvanus' monoliths have been given a walled enclosure planted with a huge orange tree, poinsettias and palms. Despite his immense girth, the chief trots from stone to stone, sweat trickling down from under his black felt hat.

He reads into the facial features and geometrical carvings everything from the symbols of leadership to the birth of feminism, fertility, war and peace.

Dates however, are not the chief's strongpoint - he explains the first archeologists to study the monoliths in a neighbouring village used carbon dating to put their age at around 2000 years.

More recent studies, he said, also using carbon dating, have estimated the age of the stones at Alok at 4500 years - that is roughly as old as the Egyptian pyramids.

A question on the likelihood of subsequent civilisations having built the same type of monolith over a period of 2500 years leaves him unfazed.

Ten minutes later he has multiplied the age of the stones by 100 and is assuring his visitors the monoliths are 450,000 years old.

WMF says the stones date from 2000 BC, but it is not clear whether the Fund is using a number supplied by the Nigerian government or whether it has dated the stones independently.

Blood sacrifices anywhere near the stones are forbidden. But on September 14 of each year, the eve of the annual yam harvest festival, the stones are decorated with coloured powder.

Only pre-pubertal children and post-menopausal women, described locally as "women who no longer go sexual" are allowed to do the decorating. The colours are white for peace, blue for fertility and red for bravery.

The decorating ritual is a highly social occasion.



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