Part Two: The Ancient Era: The Age of Silence

After the Great Loss, the archaic age ended. It is now impossible to determine how long the Great Loss lasted or when the earliest phase of the Age of Silence began. Yet the surviving historical record shows that, after a long period of upheaval, the intelligent beings who survived reestablished settlements, restored their traditions, and gradually formed new systems of civilization. Most civilizational lineages traceable by later generations begin in this period, and historians therefore refer to it collectively as the Age of Silence. Modern historians can reconstruct with reasonable confidence only the middle and later phases of the Age of Silence. Taken together, astronomical records, the positions of ancient Realms, the cycles of Realm routes, and later chronological calibrations place this datable phase roughly between 15,000 and 10,200 years before the Stargate Calendar, though the Age of Silence may in fact have begun far earlier.

Compared with the archaic era, the contracts, stone inscriptions, genealogies, and astronomical records left by the Age of Silence permit a much clearer chronology to be established. All dates in this chapter have been converted by later scholars into years before the Stargate Calendar; events lacking sufficient historical evidence are still assigned only approximate periods.

The earliest settlements of the Age of Silence discovered to date were mostly established near archaic ruins. The Sleeping City on the southern continent of Star Tiyang is one of the best-preserved examples. According to later chronological conversions based on the Records of the Yifu Stones and the site's stratigraphy, the ancestors of the Yifu people reached the southern continent sometime between approximately 14,000 and 13,000 years before the Stargate Calendar, where they discovered immense stone-built ruins extending for hundreds of li. There were no inhabitants within the ruins, no writing they could read, and no facilities whose purposes they could identify. The first Yifu settlement was established on the outskirts of the site. Over the following centuries, more and more tribes gathered there, eventually forming the Yifu city-state confederation and gradually developing into the later Yifu Union.