Sifting European accounts of Dahomey from the 1720s to the 1890s, Law dates the female soldiers Europeans called Amazons. Armed women guarded the palace from at least the reign of Agaja, a consequence of the rule that no man slept inside the palace walls, but through the eighteenth century they numbered a few hundred and served ceremonial and bodyguard duties. The shift came under Gezo: by the 1840s visitors were counting thousands and hearing of campaigns the women had rescued after the men broke and fled. Their command structure mirrored the male army, each male officer having a female counterpart addressed as his mother, part of a wider Dahomian pairing of palace and outside offices. Law reads their songs about leaving maize and palms to the men as a claim to have been reborn as men by the king, which endorses the link between courage and masculinity instead of unsettling it.