Drinking with dead kings: ritual and rulership in the kingdom of Chimor

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The early twentieth-century anthropologist A. M. Hocart wrote about the origins of kingship and the importance of ritual in its creation and maintenance, leaving us with the striking phrase, ‘the first king must have been a dead king.’ Hocart’s argument was that kingship and government originate in and develop from ritual organization. One of the earliest detailed accounts of a royal court on Peru’s North Coast describes the arrival of Ñaimlap, a legendary founder of the Lambayeque dynasty that grew wealthy between the 10th and 14th centuries CE. According to one history, written in 1586, centuries after that dynasty ceased to exist, the king and his court arrived fully formed. As with many other legendary kings ‘from away’ known across the globe, this magnificent arrival sidesteps the question of origins and legitimacy and jumpstarts the establishment of a dynasty and a royal court of unprecedented splendor on Peru’s North Coast in the centuries before the rise of the Inca Empire in the fifteenth century. The logical corollary of Hocart’s argument about the fundamental role of ritual practice in the foundation and maintenance of kingship is that the position of the ruler originates in and develops from his position at the apex of ritual performance. This paper focuses on ritual practice, specifically the pomp of Ñaimlap’s court, and that of a succeeding dynasty, based at Chan Chan in the Moche Valley. One of the striking features of these Northern Dynasties is the unprecedented increase in the production of ritual vessels of silver and gold. Often bearing complex imagery, these objects shed light on ceremonial behavior, cosmology, and ritual practice, reminding us of what can be learned from a close reading of the iconography of elite regalia and the performance of power.