The Edo capital was Ubinu, known as Benin City to the Portuguese who first heard about it from the coastal Itsekiri, who pronounced it this way; from this the kingdom came to be known as the Benin Empire in the West.
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The Gbedu drum is said to have been brought to the Lagos area in the seventeenth century by Edo diplomats, symbolizing the hegemony of the Benin Empire.
The idea of a multinational unifying African state was noted in the French publication Le Monde diplomatique as a successor to the medieval African empires: the Ethiopian Empire, the Ghana Empire, the Mali Empire, the Songhai Empire, the Benin Empire, the Kanem Empire, and other historic nation states.