MUS2026-213 - museum specimen
N'Yoro Oekum'
Lagos, Nigeria - West Africa
Sacred / spirit
N'YORO OEKUM' English (museum-card local name unglossed)
Source term: Bull-roarer
N'YORO OEKUM': the local name recorded on the Pitt Rivers card for accession 1924.2.36, Lagos, 1924, reproduced exactly including the trailing apostrophe. Unglossed — no language, speaker or modern orthography is attached to it in the record, and none is asserted here.
At Lagos, a wooden blade no wider than a finger carried the name N'YORO OEKUM'. Its 137 millimetres of carved wood and long cord belonged to ceremonial and religious music. The name survives, but not the language that explains it, the people who used it, or the rite in which its voice was heard.
N'YORO OEKUM'
Pitt Rivers Museum 1924.2.36, local-name field
- Object
- A carved wooden blade, 137 x 14 mm, very narrow and tapered, with a single long cord attached at its squared terminal end; exact PRM photograph. The museum's own identification of the object is 'Bull-roarer'.
- Function
- A ceremonial and religious musical instrument in the Pitt Rivers Museum classification; the specific rite, player and occasion are not recorded.
- Map confidence
- medium - Lagos city anchor from the record's sole geographical field; the museum gives no quarter, village, findspot or use site, so the point locates the recorded place of origin and nothing narrower.
- Source location
Page references
PRM 1924.2.36 (prm-object-39564)