Chimor (also Kingdom of Chimor or Chimú Empire) was the political grouping of the Chimú culture (Spanish pronunciation: [tʃiˈmu]). The culture arose about 900 CE, succeeding the Moche culture, and was later conquered by the Inca emperor Topa Inca Yupanqui around 1470, fifty years before the arrival of the Spanish in the region. Chimor was the largest kingdom in the Late Intermediate Period, encompassing 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) of modern-day Peruvian coastline.
According to Chimú oral history, the history of Chimor began with the arrival of Taycanamo in the Moche Valley from the sea on a balsa raft. From there, his descendants would conquer surrounding areas starting with his son Guacricur. Guacricur integrated Chimú's reign over the lower valley and Ñancempinco, Taycanamo's grandson, would expand the kingdom by conquering the upper valley. Ñançenpinco began further expansion both north and south of the Moche Valleys.
The first valleys seem to have joined forces willingly, but the Sican culture was acquired through conquest. They also were significantly influenced by the pre-Inca Cajamarca and Wari cultures. According to legend, its capital of Chan Chan was founded by Taycanamo. Chimor was the last kingdom that had any chance of stopping the Inca Empire. But the Inca conquest began in the 1470s by Topa Inca Yupanqui, defeating the emperor and descendant of Taycanamo, Minchançaman, and was nearly complete when Huayna Capac assumed the throne in 1493.
The Chimú resided on a strip of desert on the northern coast of Peru. The rivers in the region carved a series of fertile valley plains, which were very flat and well-suited to irrigation. Agriculture and fishing were both very important to the Chimú economy.
The Chimú worshipped the Moon, and unlike the Inca considered it more powerful than the sun. Offerings played an important role in religious rites. A common object for offerings, as well as one used by artisans, was the shell of the Spondylus shellfish, which resides only in the warm coastal waters off present-day Ecuador. Associated with the sea, rainfall, and fertility, Spondylus shells were highly valued and traded by the Chimú people, and the exchange of the shells played a significant economic and political role in the empire.
The Chimú people are best known for their distinctive monochromatic pottery and fine metal working of copper, gold, silver, bronze, and tumbaga (copper and gold). The pottery is often in the shape of a creature or has a human figure sitting or standing on a cuboid bottle. The shiny black finish of most Chimú pottery was achieved by firing the pottery at high temperatures in a closed kiln, which prevented oxygen from reacting with the clay.
History
Early Chimú (Moche civilization)
The oldest civilization present on the north coast of Peru is the Moche or Mochica civilization, which is identified as Early Chimú. The start of this period is not known for certain, but it ended around 700. It was centered in the Chicama, Moche, and Viru Valleys. "Many large pyramids are attributed to the Early Chimú period." (37) These pyramids are built of adobe in rectangular shapes made from molds. "Early Chimú cemeteries are also found without pyramid associations. Burials are usually in extended positions in prepared tombs. The rectangular, adobe-lined and covered tombs have niches in their walls in which bowls were placed". (39)
The early pottery is also characterized by realistic modeling and painted scenes.
Expansion and rule
Expansion
During the reign of the Wari Empire over Peru, the mature Chimú culture developed in roughly the same territory where the Mochica had existed centuries before. The Chimú was also a coastal culture – according to legend, its capital of Chan Chan was founded by Taycanamo, who arrived in the area by sea. It was developed in the Moche Valley north of present-day Lima, northeast of Huarmey, and finishing in central present-day Trujillo. Later, it expanded to Arequipa. During this time, Arequipa was framed by 3 volcanoes. (39)
The Chimú appeared in the year 900. Chimor, also known as the Kingdom of Chimor, had its capital "at the great site now called Chanchan, between Trujillo and the sea, and we may assume that Taycanamo founded his kingdom there. His son, Guacri-caur, conquered the lower part of the valley and was succeeded by a son named Nancen-pinco who really laid the foundations of the Kingdom by conquering the head of the valley of Chimor and the neighboring valleys of Sana, Pacasmayo, Chicama, Viru, Chao and Santa."
The estimated founding date of the last Chimú kingdom is in the first half of the fourteenth century. Nacen-pinco was believed to have ruled around 1370 and was followed by seven rulers whose names are not yet known. Minchançaman followed these rulers, and was ruling around the time of the Inca conquest (between 1462 and 1470). This great expansion is believed to have occurred during the late period of Chimú civilization, called: Late Chimú, but the development of the Chimú territory spanned a number of phases and more than a single generation. Nacen-pinco, "may have pushed the imperial frontiers to Jequetepeque and to Santa, but conquest of the entire region was an agglutinative process initiated by earlier rulers". (17)
The Chimú expanded to include a vast area and many different ethnic groups. The first valleys seem to have joined forces willingly, but the Sican culture was assimilated through conquest. At its peak, the Chimú advanced to the limits of the desert coast to the valley of the Jequetepeque River in the north. Pampa Grande in the Lambayeque Valley was also ruled by the Chimú.
To the south, they expanded as far as Carabayllo. Their expansion southward was stopped by the military power of the great valley of Lima. Historians and archeologists contest how far south they managed to expand.
From what scholars can tell the Chimú had a complex and consolidated empire. The capitol consisted of Chan Chan, lower-class, workshops and homes with a population estimate of around 30,000. These workshops were all built in around adobe palaces in order to impose social hierarchy ideals. The Chan Chan also had restrictions and were not offered the same privileges as the elite. They had limited access to rituals, bureaucracy, and administrative roles. The high regulations were necessary to keep order with food production and state re-distribution of the products. The class system also helped to determine who would work to create state-sponsored monuments.
Rule
The Chimú society was a four-level hierarchical system, with a powerful elite rule over administrative centers. The hierarchy was centered at the walled cities, later called ciudadelas by the Spanish, at Chan Chan. The political power at Chan Chan is demonstrated by the organization of labor to construct the Chimú's canals and irrigated fields.
Chan Chan was the top of the Chimu hierarchy, with Farfán in the Jequetepeque Valley as a subordinate. This organisation, which was quickly established during the conquest of the Jequetepeque Valley, suggests the Chimú established the hierarchy during the early stages of their expansion. The existing elite at peripheral locations, such as the Jequetepeque Valley and other centers of power, were incorporated into the Chimú government on lower levels of the hierarchy. These lower-order centers managed land, water, and labor, while the higher-order centers either moved the resources to Chan Chan or carried out other administrative decisions. Rural sites were used as engineering headquarters while the canals were being built; later they operated as maintenance sites. The numerous broken bowls found at Quebrada del Oso support this theory, as the bowls were probably used to feed the large workforce that built and maintained that section of canal. The workers were probably fed and housed at state expense.
The Chimú's vast territorial expansion increased the amount of cultural identities within the civilization. They also incorporated political ideologies along with cultural beliefs this is seen with the Late Sicán in the north and the Casma in the South. Despite this, many areas kept distinctive aspects of their culture and some gained autonomy after the conquest.
It has been argued that Chimú leaders conquered territories further away because of the deviations in inheritance. The opposition to this is that an El Niño that had caused the state to increase the extractive economy in place and get supplies from other areas of the Andes. This El Niño is theorized to have occurred around A.D. 1100 and would have caused the destruction of irrigation canals. Both arguments suggest that agriculture expansion led to increased identities socially and politically.
The Chimú conquered the Jequetepeque around 1320 and changed the political structure of the society. Places like Pacatnamú were left behind and other sites like Farfán had increased laborers for administrative compounds constructed under the supervision of Imperial administrators. Land use, agricultural methods and settlement patterns of the Jequetepeque societies all changed after the conquest. Many households had to see tribute requirements and agricultural production increased.
The Chimú Empire possibly played a crucial role as an intermediary in extensive trans-Andean trade networks that reached into the Amazon basin. Landscape resistance modelling indicates that northern coastal centres, particularly the Chimú capital of Chan Chan, were situated along highly efficient trade corridors connecting the Amazonian slopes to the central coast of Peru. Through these networks, the Chimú likely facilitated the exchange of exotic luxury goods, such as live Amazonian parrots (including various macaw species) sourced by upper Amazonian groups like the Chachapoyas. These birds were subsequently traded southward via established coastal routes to other polities, such as the Ychsma at Pachacamac, to supply vibrant tropical feathers for elite funerary ornaments.
Downfall
The state governed such social classes until the empire of the Sican culture conquered the kingdom of Lambayeque, Peru. The legends of war were said to have been told by the leaders Naylamp in the Sican language and Taycanamo in Chimú. The people paid tribute to the rulers with products or labor.
Chimor was the last Andean kingdom capable of stopping the Inca Empire, but the Inca conquest was begun in the 1470s by Topa Inca Yupanqui, who defeated the emperor Minchançaman, and was nearly complete when Huayna Capac assumed the throne in 1493. They moved Minchançaman, the final Chimú emperor, to Cusco and redirected gold and silver there to adorn the Qurikancha. The Chimu Empire was the largest polity conquered by the Inca.
Economy
Chan Chan could be said to have developed a bureaucracy due to the elite's controlled access to information. The economic and social system operated through the import of raw materials, where they were processed into prestige goods by artisans at Chan Chan. The elite at Chan Chan made the decisions on most other matters concerning organization, monopolizing production, storage of food and products, and distribution or consumption of goods.
The majority of the citizens in each ciudadela were artisans. In the late Chimú, about 12,000 artisans lived and worked in Chan Chan alone. They engaged in fishing, agriculture, craft work, and trade. Artisans were forbidden to change their profession and were grouped in the ciudadela according to their area of specialisation. Archeologists have noted a dramatic increase in Chimú craft production, and they believe that artisans may have been brought to Chan Chan from another area taken as a result of Chimú conquest. As there is evidence of both metalwork and weaving in the same domestic unit, it is likely that both men and women were artisans. They engaged in fishing, agriculture, and metallurgy and made ceramics and textiles from cotton and the wool of llama, alpaca, and vicuña. People used reed fishing canoes (displayed in the image on the right), hunted, and traded.
Subsistence and agriculture
The Chimú developed mainly through intensive farming techniques and hydraulic work, which joined valleys to form complexes, such as the Chicama-Moche complex, which was a combination of two valleys in La Libertad. The Lambayeque linked the valleys of La Leche, Lambayeque, Reque, and Saña Jequetepeque. They developed an excellent agricultural techniques which expanded the strength of their cultivated areas. Huachaques were sunken farms where land was withdrawn to work the moist, sandy soil underneath, an example of which is Tschudi.
The Chimú used walk-in wells, similar to those of the Nazca, to draw water, and reservoirs to contain the water from rivers. This system increased the productivity of the land, which increased Chimú wealth and likely contributed to the formation of a bureaucratic system. The Chimú cultivated beans, sweet potatoes, papaya, and cotton with their reservoir and irrigation system. This focus on large-scale irrigation persisted until the Late Intermediate period. At this point, there was a shift to a more specialized system that focused on importing and redistributing resources from satellite communities. There appears to have been a complex network of sites that provided goods and services for Chimú subsistence. Many of these sites produced commodities that the Chimú could not.
Many sites relied on marine resources, but after the advent of agriculture, there were more sites further inland, where marine resources were harder to obtain. Keeping llamas arose as a supplemental way of obtaining meat, but by the Late Intermediate period and Late Horizon, inland sites used llamas as a main resource, although they maintained contact with coastal sites to use supplemental marine resources. They also made masks.
Technology
One of the earliest known examples of distance communication is a Chimú device consisting of two resin-coated gourds connected by a 75-foot length of twine. Only one example has been found, and nothing is known about its originator or use.
Split inheritance
The Chimu capital, Chan Chan, had a series of elite residential compounds or cuidadelas that were not occupied simultaneously but sequentially. The reason for this is that Chimu rulers practiced split inheritance, which dictated that the heir to the throne had to build his own palace. After the death of a ruler, all the ruler's wealth would be distributed to more distant relatives.