[4] Excavation of terracotta vessels, headrests, and anthropomorphic figurines from the Calabar region of southeast Nigeria, dated to roughly the 5th to 15th centuries, revealed "an iconography readily comparable" to nsibidi.

[9][10] Robert Farris Thompson glosses the Ekoid word nsibidi as translating to "cruel letters", from sibi "bloodthirsty".

The context is the use of the symbols by the Ekpe society in the Old Calabar slave traders who had established a "lavish system of human sacrifice".

The Ekpe societies were a legislative, judicial, and executive power before colonisation in parts of Aro Confederacy,[citation needed] including Igbos, Efik, Ibibios who exerted much influence over the old Cross River region, located in today's Nigeria.

[18] A few years later, the anthropologist Percy Amaury Talbot [fr] was unable to verify the tradition recorded by Macgregor and concluded that the claims of the Ekoi to have created the system were more plausible.

[19] Nsibidi has a wide vocabulary of signs usually imprinted on calabashes, brass ware, textiles, wood sculptures, masquerade costumes, buildings and on human skin.

[6] Nsibidi spread to other parts of Nigeria, especially the Igbos, who are neighbors to the old Calabar people (the Efik, Ibibio and Annang).

Symbols including lovers, metal rods, trees, feathers, hands in friendship war and work, masks, moons, and stars are dyed onto ukara cloths.

Ukara includes naturalistic designs representing objects such as gongs, feathers and manilla currency, a symbol of wealth.

[22] Below are some examples of Nsibidi recorded by J. K. Macgregor (1909)[16] and Elphinstone Dayrell (1910 and 1911)[1][23] for The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland and Man.