Talk:Ohen

Removed military history project

I see no reference or description of a military event or operation so I removed the military history project banner. I am not sure what the bot saw to add the project to the banner. The article is well written and I don't quarrel with a B rating. FWIW, I do not see any description of the treaty which Ohen's action might have been deemed to violate and why this would have been so. (I might guess but that is not sufficient information for the reader.) Donner60 (talk) 01:00, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Telescopes?

How can he have received a telescope from anyone if telescopes did not exist at the time? Are these articles accurate? 2600:387:F:7815:0:0:0:2 (talk) 14:50, 17 April 2025 (UTC)

GA review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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This review is transcluded from Talk:Ohen/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Nominator: Vanderwaalforces (talk · contribs) 14:52, 28 May 2026 (UTC)

Reviewer: Gommeh (talk · contribs) 16:52, 3 June 2026 (UTC)

Doing this as part of GARC. I will get to this soon. Gommeh ^{(talk! sign!)} 16:52, 3 June 2026 (UTC)

Good Article review progress box

Criteria: 1a. prose () 1b. MoS () 2a. ref layout () 2b. cites WP:RS () 2c. no WP:OR () 2d. no WP:CV () 3a. broadness () 3b. focus () 4. neutral () 5. stable () 6a. free or tagged images () 6b. pics relevant () Note: this represents where the article stands relative to the Good Article criteria. Criteria marked are unassessed

GA criteria commentary

• There is one image in the article, and it is properly licensed and relevant.
• Nominator easily passes the authorship requirement, at over 90% authorship.
• The article looks stable.
• Earwig indicates a 20% likelihood for copyvios. While the passages appear to be properly cited and quoted, that number still seems a little high; still, this is not enough of an issue for GA purposes in my opinion.
• There's a decent chance that a lot (if not all) of these sources are reliable given the obvious academic backgrounds they have. None of the reliable sources pages in project space that I've seen mention these, but I will assume good faith and that they are OK to use.

Article commentary

• The first two subsections under "reign" look fine prose-wise, but they could use a few more wikilinks (one or two will suffice).
• What is the "Ekoko n'Utẹ" masquerade festival? What does it consist of? This may need to be explained for people unfamiliar with the topic.

This is probably one of the shortest first passes I've ever done at GA. I tried to find more things to critique, but wasn't able to, as history was not my best subject in school (especially African history, of which I know little). Please ping me when the two things I mentioned are done and we can go on to a source check. Gommeh ^{(talk! sign!)} 13:39, 5 June 2026 (UTC)

@Gommeh The two done. Re the 20% from copyvio, it is actually matches of the paper's title throughout, which is inevitable. Vanderwaalforces (talk) 15:20, 5 June 2026 (UTC)

Fair enough. Gommeh ^{(talk! sign!)} 17:55, 5 June 2026 (UTC)

Source spot check

Please provide quotations from the sources which back up the following citations. They do not need to be very long; only a sentence or two is good enough for each: 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21. Gommeh ^{(talk! sign!)} 18:00, 5 June 2026 (UTC)

@Gommeh Here you go, thank ya!

• 1: Benin City was burned by the British, who then made the kingdom part of British Nigeria (which became Nigeria after the country gained independence in 1960). After that time, the kingdom no longer played a governing role in West Africa. However, even today, the oba still serves in Benin City as a government advisor.
• 3: After the Ọranmiyan dynasty took control of the totality of the city, the Ogiamiẹn family appears to have dropped out of historical view for some time, resurfacing during Ọba Ohẹn’s early 15th-century reign.
• 5: It was dangerous to look the oba in the face because the oba had all sorts of magical powers. Unlike mortal men, the Edo believed, the oba did not need to eat, sleep, or wash. The servants who waited on him in the palace could not talk about the oba's physical life. The penalty was death for saying, or even hinting, that the oba ate and slept. The oba could not show any sign of human weakness. ...In the fourteenth century an oba named Ohen was given the coral crown. Ohen had ruled the kingdom for about twenty-five years when he got sick and could no longer walk. So he told his chiefs that he had been partly transformed into a mudfish, a sacred symbol of royal power.
• 7: I'd pick 6 instead and it goes: In the art, Oba Ohen is depicted as a king, half human at the top and half fish below, with the legs forming the fish image to mask his deformity. The artists grew up to learn of such events and to appreciate the deep layers and undertones of meanings embedded in iconographic details such that a deviation from the norm was seen more as weakness rather than strength.
• 9: Unfortunately he was discovered, and the Oba, growing angry at his action, ordered him to be instantly ... put to death.
• 11: The other chiefs are terror-stricken, and plot to get rid of Ohen. They dig a pit beneath the throne, which they conceal with only a thin covering. When the Oba sits on his throne, he crashes into the pit, and the chiefs and people stone him to death.
• 13: The Oba tried to pacify them but they became more and more rebellious and at last stoned him to death after a reign of about thirty-six years.
• 15: This is more or less an introductory statement but we could go with A related case to the one above is that of the guild of carvers (Igbesanmwan) whose primary raw materials included wood and ivory. Though the guild had already been given formal existence during Ogiso Ere's reign, their activities reached a high point of recognition during the reign of Oba Ewuare who patronized them heavily and uplifted the guild from local to widespread prominence. The situation of the guild of weavers (Owina n'ido) is different from the above in that its origin is located in the reign of Oba Ohen who is reputed to have been struck with deformity. In the Oba's anxiety to hide his deformity from general knowledge on account of the fact that it will cost him the throne, it is reputed that he contracted the specialist weavers to produce patterns that covered his legs and hid the deformity.
• 17: The paternalism and gendered nature of jihadist objections and their nega- tive impact on royal and nonroyal women's economic powers strikingly paral- lel changes that occurred during the rule of an important late-fifteenth-century Benin oba or king, Oba Ohen. According to the oral history of a Benin palace guild of royal male weavers, Oba Ohen's guild was initially composed of seven palace women. It appears (though it is not explicitly stated) that these women... oversaw the weaving of royal cloth or did all of the weaving themselves, and that they were palace slaves rather than royal concubines or wives; palace men spun the thread.
• 19: The Ine of Igbesanmwan stated that the crocodile heads that appear at the Ọba’s waist on certain 16th-century plaques were a mode Ohẹn began. The variety of crocodile was the small, more docile type known as ẹghughu, 63 about which it is said, “Te ẹghughu buaro rua na gba,” or “The ‘alligator’ will look at you and tie up its mouth.”64 The animal is used in medicine to prevent enemies from creating obstacles, as well as medicine designed to paralyze opponents. Ohẹn’s use of it may have been related to an attempted cure for his legs.
• 21: In a variation, Orhue Ọmọrẹgbẹ oh’Origie told Bradbury that Ohẹn had no son, so a diviner instructed him to marry Elẹrẹ (sometimes referred to by others as Elẹyẹ), the daughter of the Ogi’Utẹ, so the monarch visited her secretly at night. In this account, her father used medicine to ensure Ohẹn wouldn’t awaken early, then caught him. Subsequently both her father and the monarch danced to the palace, disguised as masqueraders.

Vanderwaalforces (talk) 18:57, 5 June 2026 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Peer review

Ohen

Recently passed GA, but I aim for FA, so comments towards that direction would be very much appreciated please. Thank you! Vanderwaalforces (talk) 19:37, 11 June 2026 (UTC)

RoySmith

This subject is well out of my depth, but I did a little searching in JSTOR for other sources and found a few papers that don't appear to be cited here:

• Ben-Amos, Paula. “Owina N’Ido: Royal Weavers of Benin.” African Arts, vol. 11, no. 4, 1978, pp. 49–96. JSTOR, https://doi-org.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org/10.2307/3335344. Accessed 12 June 2026.
• Sloane, Patricia, et al. “Letters to the Editor.” The Art Bulletin, vol. 53, no. 4, 1971, pp. 552–55. JSTOR, https://doi-org.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org/10.2307/3048924. Accessed 12 June 2026.
• Ross, Doran H. “Memory and Medicine at the British Museum.” African Arts, vol. 36, no. 4, 2003, pp. 1–90. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org/stable/3337974. Accessed 12 June 2026.
• Blackmun, Barbara Winston. “Icons and Emblems in Ivory: An Altar Tusk from the Palace of Old Benin.” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, vol. 23, no. 2, 1997, pp. 149–98. JSTOR, https://doi-org.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org/10.2307/4104381. Accessed 12 June 2026.
• Soppelsa, Robert T. “Two Relief Sculptures from the Kingdom of Benin.” Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts, vol. 70, no. 1/2, 1996, pp. 44–49. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org/stable/41504920. Accessed 12 June 2026. (oddly enough, this one refers to "Oba Ohen of the early fifteenth century")

If you've already seen those and decided there wasn't anything of value, that's fine, but WP:FACR 1c requires "a thorough and representative survey of the relevant literature", so you need to be digging for these and evaluating them. The fact that I was able to find five papers after a fairly cursory search makes me think you may need to be doing more research to ensure you've covered the "thorough and representative" requirement. RoySmith (talk) 00:35, 12 June 2026 (UTC)

PS, I used a "English language only" filter. There's a lot in JSTOR in other languages; I didn't look at those, but you should. RoySmith (talk) 00:37, 12 June 2026 (UTC)

@RoySmith Ah, thank you so much. When rewriting this article, I tried looking for sources in depth, but I know we’re better thank each other in this research of a thing. I’ll check them and let you know. Vanderwaalforces (talk) 14:52, 13 June 2026 (UTC)

There might also be something useful in https://search.worldcat.org/title/29375240: the NYPL entry for it says it covers Oba Ohen. Also:

• Micots, Courtnay. Review of Art, Performance and Ritual in Benin City. Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute, vol. 81, 2011, p. 512-514. Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/450298.

which you should be able to access via The Wikipedia Library RoySmith (talk) 15:33, 13 June 2026 (UTC)

Abraka mentions "The Abraka people are historically significant as the first group of Urhobos to migrate from the ancient Benin Kingdom around 1370 AD. Their migration was led by Prince Avweake (also spelled Awaeke), a son of Oba Ohen of Benin" so I'd chase that down to see if it leads anywhere. RoySmith (talk) 15:40, 13 June 2026 (UTC)

@RoySmith That is so interesting! I am reading the sources right now. I actually saw the Sloane, Patricia, et al. “Letters to the Editor.” when I was initially researching, but I didn't think it is a source I could use (I still don't think so, lol), but I am still working. I am really appreciative for these sources you found. Vanderwaalforces (talk) 12:07, 14 June 2026 (UTC)

@RoySmith Hi, I wanted to inform you that I have incorporated these four sources which you suggested into the article:

• Ben-Amos, Paula (1978). "Owina N'Ido: Royal Weavers of Benin". African Arts. 11 (4). UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center: 49–53. ISSN 0001-9933. JSTOR 3335344.
• Blackmun, Barbara Winston (1997). "Icons and Emblems in Ivory: An Altar Tusk from the Palace of Old Benin". Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies. 23 (2). The Art Institute of Chicago: 149–198. ISSN 0069-3235. JSTOR 4104381.
• Sloane, Patricia; Pasztory, Esther; Rosenblum, Robert; Stechow, Wolfgang; Harris, Ann Sutherland (1971). "Letters to the Editor". The Art Bulletin. 53 (4): 552–555. doi:10.1080/00043079.1971.10790568. ISSN 0004-3079. Retrieved 2026-06-19.
• Soppelsa, Robert Thomas (1996). "Two Relief Sculptures from the Kingdom of Benin". Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts. 70 (1/2). Detroit Institute of Arts: 44–49. ISSN 0011-9636. JSTOR 41504920.

I found these four to be more relevant and used them. Vanderwaalforces (talk) 18:11, 19 June 2026 (UTC)