The idea of black African civilization on this level was quite simply unimaginable to a European a hundred years ago. … In 1910, when the German anthropologist Leo Frobenius found the first brass head in a shrine outside the city of Ife, he was so overwhelmed by its technical and aesthetic assurance that he immediately associated it with the greatest art that he knew – the Classical sculptures of ancient Greece.

Neil MacGregor, A History of the World in 1…, loc. 988