In Yoruba thought, Ile-Ife is the place where the world was created and humankind first settled, making the city itself a sacred origin point rather than merely a place of residence. Yoruba towns were laid out around the palace (afin) of a sacred ruler descended from the founding deities, with the market and shrines at the civic heart. Ife's artists produced naturalistic terracotta and brass heads of extraordinary technical refinement between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. The cosmology tied political legitimacy, the layout of the town and the order of the cosmos into a single scheme.
Ife embodies an indigenous African theory of the city as sacred creation-centre, in which urban form, kingship and cosmology are deliberately fused, a planning idea in its own right.