African Art: Maps, Timelines & additional Image sources

This collection features digital copies of 113 antique maps of Africa and accompanying text dating from the mid-16th Century to the early 20th Century. All scanned maps are authentic and originally collected by the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, Northwestern University.

List of african languages with associated maps indicating where they are spoken.

Historical maps of Africa primarily from the 19th & 20c. Includes maps of various types: political, topographical, thematic, etc.

Pairs essays and works of art with chronologies, telling the story of art and global culture through the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC) collection.

For place names and their variants.

World Heritage Sites: Africa is a versatile collection of more than 86,000 objects of visual, contextual, and spatial documentation of African heritage and rock art sites.

Unites all known objects, historical photographs and documentation from collections worldwide to provide a long-requested overview of the royal artefacts from the Benin Kingdom looted in the late nineteenth century. Digital Benin links documentation, oral histories, object research, and the historical context to an Edo language catalogue with provenance names, a map of the Benin Kingdom and museum collections worldwide. Digital Benin documents 5,246 objects in 131 institutions in 20 countries. For auction catalogs documenting the sale of these objects see "The Digital Benin Project - Auction Catalogs" elsewhere on this page.

The Watson Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art, has identied and scanned 47 auction catalogs pertaining to the sale of the famed Benin Bronzes and other artworks and cultural artifacts that were looted from the Kingdom of Benin during a British-led expedition in February 1897. This link leads to these digitized catalogs; open each to look for objects related to your research interests.

Link to auction catalogs; to search their contents filter by department.

Under "Department" select either African & Oceanic Art or African Modern & Contemporary Art.