纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 063伊费头像（3）（在线收听）

"Personally it has the effect on me that certain sculptures of the Buddha have. The presence of tranquillity in a work of art speaks of a great internal civilisation. Because you can't have the tranquillity without reflection, you can't have the tranquillity without having asked the great questions about your place in the universe, and having answered those questions to some degree of satisfaction. And that for me is what civilisation is."

The idea of black African civilisation on this level was quite simply unimaginable to a European a hundred years ago. In 1910, when the German anthropologist Leo Frobenius found the very 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. But what possible connection could there have been between ancient Greece and Nigeria? There's no record of contact in the literature or in the archaeology. For Frobenius there was an obvious and exhilarating solution to the conundrum. The lost island of Atlantis must have sunk off the coast of Nigeria, and the Greek survivors stepped ashore to make this astonishing sculpture.