Editing Moat (section)

===Africa===
The [[Walls of Benin]] were a combination of ramparts and moats, called Iya, used as a defence of the capital [[Benin City]] in present-day Edo State of Nigeria. It was considered the largest man-made structure lengthwise, second only to the [[Great Wall of China]] and the largest earthwork in the world. Recent work by Patrick Darling has established it as the largest man-made structure in the world, larger than [[Sungbo's Eredo]], also in Nigeria. It enclosed  {{Convert|6,500|km2|abbr=on}} of community lands. Its length was over {{Convert|16,000|km|abbr=on}} of earth boundaries. It was estimated that earliest construction began in 800 and continued into the mid-15th century.{{cn|date=January 2025}}

The walls are built of a ditch and dike structure, the ditch dug to form an inner moat with the excavated earth used to form the exterior rampart.{{cn|date=January 2025}}

The Benin Walls were ravaged by the British in 1897. Scattered pieces of the walls remain in Edo, with material being used by the locals for building purposes. The walls continue to be torn down for real-estate developments.{{cn|date=January 2025}}

The Walls of Benin City were the world's largest man-made structure. [[Fred Pearce]] wrote in ''[[New Scientist]]'':<blockquote>They extend for some 16,000 kilometres in all, in a mosaic of more than 500 interconnected settlement boundaries. They cover 6,500 square kilometres and were all dug by the Edo people. In all, they are four times longer than the Great Wall of China, and consumed a hundred times more material than the Great Pyramid of Cheops. They took an estimated 150 million hours of digging to construct, and are perhaps the largest single archaeological phenomenon on the planet.<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg16322035-100-the-african-queen/|title=The African queen|last=Pearce|first=Fred|date=1999-09-11|newspaper=New Scientist}}</ref></blockquote>