The Kingdom of Bamoun (also spelled Bamoum, Bamun, Bamoun, or Mum) (1394–c. 1916) is a pre-colonial Central African state in what is now northwest Cameroon. It was founded by the Bamun, an ethnic group from northeast Cameroon. Its capital was the ancient walled city of Fumban. Origins The Mbam-et-Inoubou and the Grassfields, Bamum people(Bamoun) and bafia people share ancestry. Origin: Old Bamum Kingdom (Cameroon) Biography: Bamum Kingdom was a pre-colonial state located in the northwest of present-day Cameroon. The Bamъm are an ethnic group of Tikar origin, who spread through the Grasslands Territories and established a political entity in the 17th century, reaching its splendor around their capital, Foumban, along the 19th century. The Bamum were a hierarchical society, in which the king (fon) was the highest authority. The use of certain materials, objects and symbols were monopoly of the monarch, who used them as a power symbol. This privilege could be extended to other levels of the hierarchy, which granted status to whoever possessed them, and showed the relationship between the king and his subjects, and amidst the monarch, the nobility and other strata. According to this, the Bamun kingsґ throne is considered an excellent example of political art at the service of power. The Bamum throne consists of several solid pieces of assembled wood, lined with a mesh of European glass beads and cowrie shells (mbьm) (used as currency, payment of dowries, etc.). The seat of the throne is cylindrical and carved with two-headed serpents (an attribute of royal power). Few artistic works of Africa have garnered as much admiration and sheer awe as the beaded thrones from the Cameroon Grasslands that found their way into European museums in the early 1900s. These multi-colored, beaded thrones and stools—particularly those of King Nsangou, sixteenth king of the Bamoun dynasty, and his son, King Njoya Ibrahim—incorporate Anthropomorphic and zoomorphic designs integral to the Bamoun culture and are among the crown jewels of ethnographic museums in Paris, Geneva, Berlin, and other world capitals. The research of Claude Tardits, Christraud Geary, Silvia Forni, and other dedicated anthropologists have, over the past seventy years, gleaned rare insights into the central role played by these thrones and other works of art in the daily life and formal celebrations of the Bamoun kingdom. These scholars have also helped clarify the dynamics of the African art markets, from the arrival of Europeans in West and Central