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        Àbùtù Ẹ̀jẹ̀ (c.1597-1627) was the great grand-father of  Àtá Áyẹ́gbà and  his brother, Átíẹ̀lẹ̀, who founded the Ògwùchẹ́kwọ̀ royal house at Ánkpa, both sons of Ata Idoko Agánápojè. Robert Arthur Sargent, in his doctoral thesis, Politics, Economics and Social Change in the Benue Basin: 1300 – 1700 (1984), recounts an exhaustive political history of Àbùtù Ẹ̀jẹ̀. Between c.1520 and 1550 A. D., he was “the leader of the leopard community,” the

    In English language, two words are said to be  ̀homographs’  if they are spelt the same way but have different meanings. In Igala speech, a single word, pronounced with different tone pitches, produces a set of homographs – words spelt the same way but vary in meanings;   Example 1:      From the unmarked word, ‘ọko,’ a speaker calls it using different tones; he can create three different words with three different meanings. ọ́kọ́

       In the Igala culture, certain solemn ceremonies are performed during the year in the practice of the people’s traditional, ancestral religion, called Ògwùchẹ́kwọ̣̀. Traditional rites are performed during a variety of social events, such as marriage, child-naming, dedication, funeral activities, conferment of titles, appeasement of spiritual entities and during festivals scheduled for both the rainy season and the dry season.