Chimu

The Chimú are the people of Chimor, the largest kingdom of Peru's Late Intermediate Period, which arose from the ruins of the Moche around 900 on the north coast. Their capital, Chan Chan near Trujillo, was a city of adobe palaces behind nine-metre walls.

Tradition holds that the founder Taycanamo arrived from the sea on a balsa raft; his descendants widened the kingdom, conquering the Jequetepeque valley around 1320 and absorbing the Sican lands of Lambayeque around 1375. The Chimú worshipped the Moon above the Sun, and at Huanchaco archaeologists have uncovered a mass sacrifice of more than two hundred children, dated 1400 to 1450.

In 1337 they were still expanding, but the Inca emperor Topa Inca Yupanqui conquered Chimor in the 1470s and carried its last ruler, Minchançaman, to Cusco. Their Quingnam tongue, Chimor's official language, declined and was extinct by 1763.