For the past couple of years, these mysterious circles of carved stone figures, which villagers in southern Nigeria still worship on occasion, have been causing a frenzy of excitement here.

Newspapers have trumpeted the Ikom monoliths - phallic-shaped pieces of volcanic rock largely ignored for centuries - as being remnants of a glorious civilization made up in equal parts of Ancient Egypt and the Old Testament.

One theory even cites them as evidence that the biblical Garden of Eden lay in what is now Nigeria.

Nigerian bloggers have been waxing lyrical about a "high technology civilization based in the present-day location of the Sahara desert". This civilization, whose "hallmarks included the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid of Egypt", was "decimated by the deluge and by the war of the gods of antiquity".