Plaque: Warrior and Attendants 16th-17th century Edo peoples During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a remarkable series of works were created to adorn the exterior of the royal palace in Benin City. A seventeenth-century Dutch visitor to the court of Benin, Olfert Dapper, described the sprawling palace complexwith its many large courtyards and galleriesas containing wooden pillars covered from top to bottom with rectangular cast brass plaques. These plaques are understood to have autonomous meaning and to tell complex narratives in relationship to one another. At some point the plaques were removed from the palace facade, as they were no longer there when the British arrived in the region. One scholar has surmised that they "were kept like a card index…, and referred to when there was a dispute about courtly etiquette." The authors of such works were far more concerned with the communication of hierarchies and status than in capturing individual physical features. These plaq