Dynastic History | Nik An, Chan Chan — One Gate, and Everything Behind It

There is one way into Nik An. Beyond the single northern gate the adobe walls run up several metres, thicker at the base than at the top; inside is a plaza with low benches, then a corridor, then a pair of U-shaped rooms that archaeologists call audiencias, where someone sat and controlled who went further. Past them are storerooms, a well sunk to the water table, and a low platform under which the compound's lord was buried.

Ten such walled compounds stand in the six square kilometres of Chan Chan's core, capital of the kingdom of Chimor from roughly 900 until the Inca annexation, which is placed variously in the 1460s and the 1470s; no document written at the time survives to settle it. The dynasty's own account of itself comes from a Spanish chronicle of 1604, the Historia Suscinta de los Chimú, which names Taycanamo, Guacricaur and Ñancempinco, then seven rulers whose names it does not have, then Minchançaman, who was taken to Cusco after the conquest. John Rowe worked the list up in 1948. It is what there is.

The compounds have been named twice over. Nineteenth-century European visitors left their surnames on them — Tschudi, Squier, Uhle, Bandelier, Rivero — and those were later replaced with An- names, Nik An among them, though linguists including José Antonio Salas and Rita Eloranta have noted the coinages do not match colonial Mochica grammar.

The walls are earth, made and carried by people who owed the compound labour. UNESCO inscribed Chan Chan in 1986 and placed it on the In Danger list the same year, for the reason the material implies. Nik An is the compound the ticket opens; the other nine are closed.

📸 Cover: The main plaza of the Nik An (Tschudi) compound, Chan Chan, Kevstan, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons