Benin city was the seat of a theocracy of priests, in whose hands the oba or king, nominally supreme, appears to have often been a puppet.
In the Kul Oba tomb mentioned above the chamber was of stone and the contents, with one or two exceptions, of purely Greek workmanship, but the ideas underlying are the same - the king has his wife, his servant and his horse, his amphorae with wine, his cauldron with mutton-bones, his drinking vessels and his weapons, the latter being almost the only objects of barbarian style.
Others occur in the flat northern half of the Crimea, and even close to Kerch, where the famous Kul Oba seems to have held a Scythic chieftain who had adopted a veneer of Greek tastes, but remained a barbarian at heart.