The Walls of Peru – Part III The Great Wall of Peru or La Muralla Chimú

Continued from the previous post regarding the Nephite Walls, including a continuation of the Great Wall and other Peruvian walls and their purposes.
    In addition to the Sacsayhuaman outer three zigzagging walls, another perfect example of a defensive wall was built in the northwest Santa area, referred to as the Chumú wall,” or Muralla Chimú also known as the La Cumbre Wall, Wall of the Santa, and the Great Wall of Peru. It is, unfortunately, incorrectly attributed to the Chimú culture, who followed the Moche (Mochica) culture (100 AD to 700 AD), which settled in the northwest part of Peru around 900 to 1460 AD. The wall was built across the valley to the Cerro Cabezón in the background to protect, it is claimed, the Chimú city of Chan Chan (meaning “sun-sun,” or “Great Sun”) a few miles to the south of it.

The Great Wall of Peru as it crosses the Santa Valley in a straight line heading east

Located near the present day city of Trujillo along the coast sat this ancient city of Chan Chan in northern Peru. It was the largest city in the Americas and the largest adobe city on earth. Ten thousand structures, some with walls 30 feet high, were woven amid a maze of passageways and streets. Palaces and temples were decorated with elaborate friezes, some of which were hundreds of feet long. The city was fabulously wealthy, although it perennially lacked one precious resource: water, which caused the people to develop extraordinary irrigation and water-source management in controlling the river water caring surface runoff from the Andes across the desert to the sea.
    In its heyday, the twelve-square-mile city with a four-square mile center of walled citadels or quadrangles, and extravagant ciudadelas—large architectural masterpieces which housed plazas, storerooms, and burial platforms for the wealthy—held as many as 60,000 people, though early historians, like Montesinos, claimed as many as 200,000. Despite its size and affluence, the city was situated on one of the world’s bleakest coastal deserts, where the average annual rainfall was less than a tenth of an inch. Still, Chan Chan’s fields and gardens flourished, thanks to a sophisticated network of irrigation canals and wells. When a drought, coupled with movements in the earth’s crust, apparently caused the underground water table to drop, the city devised a bold plan to divert water through a canal from the Chicama River 50 miles to the north.

Built very close to the ocean, the City of Chan Chan, was completely enclosed within an outer wall 50 to 60 feet high, with the tallest walls facing to the south. Walls were made of adobe brick covered with a smooth surface with intricate designs

The Great Wall was first photographed and described by the Shippee-Johnson aerial expedition in 1931 (published in 1932), who followed the wall from the sea inland by air for about 40 miles, basically following the Santa River from the coast to the mountains. It was close to the ancient city of Chan Chan of the Chimú and also Chavin de Huantar of the Chavin Empire. The region through which it passes is very mountainous and the wall is located on the hillsides of the valley. In its original form, it is estimated that the wall was 12-15 feet high, and even 20 feet in some places, though it has deteriorated to about 7 feet today.It was also 12-15 feet thick (Robert Shippee Report (“Great Wall of Peru and Other Aerial Photographic Studies,” the Shippee-Johnson Peruvian Expedition in Geographical Review, Smithsonian, Vol22, No1, Jan., 1932, pp1-29).

The ancient wall known as the Great Wall of Peru, first photographed in 1931 from the air, then in 1934 from the ground

In discussing the Great Wall of Peru, or the La Muralla Chimú, according to one of the earliest works on the wall, a thesis by M. Brown Vega, it was suggested that the wall was built in the last century BC, and attributed to the Chavin just before their fall in 200 BC. She also connected this wall with several other walls in the area and came to the conclusion that it was probably from the Chavin period, and was used for defense (Margaret Yvette Brown Vega, “War and social life in Prehispanic Perú: ritual, defense, and communities at the fortress of Acaray, Huaura Valley,” PhD dissertation Abstracts International. 69-11. Thesis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, 2008, p241). This defense is obviously verified by the extremely high and thick walls and a single entrance into the city.
    The Carretera Panamericana Norte (Pan-American highway or PAN) cuts through the wall here, which was built to serve as the limit of their territory and defense in protecting the ancient mud city of Chan Chan from attacks from the south and central highlands, and was a main defense of the city.

The ancient mud city of Chan Chan, built of adobe and plastered over with numerous designs. Note the strong outer walls around the city

Chan Chan, located in the mouth of the Moche Valley (Santa Catalina Valley), between Huanchaco and Trujillo, which is four miles away, within the La Libertad region, about 300 miles north of Lima, was the political, administrative and cultural capital of the Chimú Empire, which was an agricultural center with a highly developed irrigation system. The complex was completely enclosed by double perimeter walls approximately ten feet apart. While the Chimú absorded the cultures of the Wari and Lamnayeque, the Moche preceded the Chimú, with the Salinar (200 BC to 200 AD) and then the Cupisnique cultures (1000-500 BC) before them. It might be of interest to know that the Salinar and Gallinazo or Virú “cultures” (the latter from the adjoining Virú Valley) of this period were in all probability expressions of north coast population.
    That is, there is almost no indication that there may have been population replacement at this time and the material culture of the two cultural groups shares many features drawn from the coastal tradition. What is called the “Salinar Period” was characterized by several features that suggests that social disruption and political unrest accompanied the end of the Early (Chavín) Horizon. Or, stated differently, there is every indication that all these cultures overlapped in territory and population and were a continuation of a single culture that developed periodical ceramics that set these so-called stages apart.
    Another of these cultures that dovetails into this era was the Cupisnique, who preceded the Chavin and Moche cultures. One of their major sites was Ventarrón, which is claimed to have the oldest documented mural in the Americas, and is a 27,000-square –foot complex located in the Lambayeque Valley, near Chiclayo and about 12 miles from Sipán, a religious and political center of the later Moche culture, which flourished from AD 1 to AD 700, about 470 miles north of Lima. Near Ventarrón is a Cupisnique adobe temple known as Collud, and a Chavin temple called Zarpan, all within the same complex.
    According to archaeologist Walter Alva, team leader of the project, "Cupisnique and Chavin shared the same gods and the same architectural and artistic forms, showing intense religious interaction among the cultures of the Early Formative Period from the north coast to the Andes and down to the central Andes (José Orozco in Caracas, Venezuela, Spider God Temple in Peru, National Geographic News, October 29, 2008). One might then ask, what makes one think that these were two different cultures, but simply one overall culture with varied interests and ceramic work?
    In all of this area, the Great Wall of Peru runs from the sea along the Santa River inland, forming an effective barrier or “defensive line” between the northern defenders and a southern invading force, such as the one mentioned in Helaman 4:7—a great wall making a “fortified line” from the “west sea even to the east,” the length of a “day’s journey for a Nephite,” where Moronihah had stationed his armies.
(See the next post, “The Walls of Peru – Part IV Defensive Walls,” for more on the Nephite construction of walls and their purpose)