Abomey's palace walls tell each king's reign in relief carving, and one part of that history involves an all-female military regiment that fought Dahomey's wars alongside, and sometimes instead of, the men.
Walls that function as a chronicle
The palace complex's clay bas-relief walls depict scenes symbolically representing the achievements and events of successive Dahomey kings' reigns, functioning collectively as a visual historical record maintained across generations, with each ruler's palace section typically adding its own portion to the wider chronicle rather than replacing what earlier kings had recorded.
Women who served as soldiers
The Kingdom of Dahomey maintained the Agojie, an elite corps of female warriors, sometimes referred to in European accounts as Amazons, who trained rigorously and served as a core military force for the kingdom across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an institutional role for women in frontline combat unusual by the standards of most contemporary states, African or European.
A kingdom's complicated economic history
Dahomey was also a major participant in the transatlantic slave trade, both as a supplier of captives to European traders and as a state whose economy and military expansion were substantially financed by that trade, a historical role that sits directly alongside the kingdom's artistic and military achievements rather than being separable from them.