Part Two: The Ancient Era: The Age of Records

【Overview of the Era】 Modern historians generally regard the Recorded Age as the stage at which ancient history entered an era of continuous documentation. From this period onward, a number of worlds left behind interconnected chronologies, genealogies, tax registers, texts of schools of thought, and city-state records, giving many people and events a traceable chronological framework for the first time.

All dates in this chapter have been converted by later scholars into years before the Stargate Calendar. Each civilization used its own calendar at the time; the years given in modern editions are calculated primarily from original calendars, astronomical phenomena, Realm-route cycles, and later chronological calibration records. Only approximate dates are still provided for places where historical sources have been poorly preserved.

The earliest boundary that can be traced with reasonably reliable continuity in the available evidence is the corpus of city-state documents from the White River Stone Repository on Tiyang Star, beginning in 10,184 before the Stargate Calendar. They preserve more than four consecutive centuries of records concerning granaries, populations, and council affairs in three city-states on the southern bank of the White River, and can be linked to the early chapters of the Yifu Stone Records. The frontier of continuous history may yet be pushed further back as new textual repositories are discovered.