The kings of Dahomey each built a palace of their own inside a single walled enclosure at Abomey, so that the site grew over two centuries into a compound of successive reigns. Each king also raised a house for his predecessor, a small shrine holding earth mixed with the blood of offerings, which made the dead king a continuing presence with a residence, attendants and a share of what the kingdom produced. Painted clay reliefs set into the walls recorded the deeds and emblems of each reign, so that the buildings were also the archive.
The annual customs were the public form of this. Tribute was brought in, the court assembled, gifts were distributed to the population, and offerings were made to the royal ancestors so that they would continue to support the kingdom. Those offerings included the killing of war captives, described by European visitors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries whose accounts served their own purposes but whose substance is corroborated by the kingdom's own traditions. The atlas records it as documented, neither dwelling on it nor pretending it away.
Ordinary Fon families memorialised their dead differently, with the asen, an iron staff carrying a small platform of figures, planted in a family shrine and used as the point of address to a particular ancestor. The royal enclosure has been on the World Heritage list since 1985, and parts of it were damaged by a tornado in 1984 and by earlier fires.