Old Crow's Big Timeline Discussion, CE 2024

So, here are the assumptions:

1. Any time we're told "it's been X thousand years" we're just taking that number at face value.
2. Umbral Eras are described as brief periods of chaos, while Astral Eras are longer periods of stability, so any UE cycle should be MUCH shorter than its corresponding AE. Notably, the 7th Umbral Era was only 5 years long, which appears to be pretty fast even as Umbral Eras go, since Lahabrea was apparently speedrunning the setup for the 8UC.
3. Some rounding to get to whole numbers is gonna get done, just to make some of the numbers easier to grok.
4. The current year is "the first year of the Seventh Astral Era" because timebubble.
5. This is just a general framework that is intentionally rough, and is mostly using information from EE1, aside from the "12000" number that's been brought up post-Endwalker and the "10000" number in the Zero/Golbez narrative. Incorporating timelines from the First and the Ninth will probably come later.

Note: The discrepancy about when the miqo'te were evicted from Eorzea and when they came back introduces a 500-year problem, because based on EE1 pp. 24-29, the time between the rise of the Allagan Empire, including Xande's death and resurrection, the downfall of the Empire from the Fourth Umbral Calamity, and the forgotten age that followed (which ends with the Fifth Umbral Calamity) is at LEAST 2500 years. But on EE1 pp. 29, the miqo'te are said to use icebridges created during the 5UC to return to Eorzea from southern Ilsabard, after they were "driven from Eorzea by the Allagan Empire almost two millennia earlier." Which means AT MOST, the miqo'te were absent from Eorzea for 2000 years.

So yeah, that's part of the reason I'm posting this, to see if information from later EEs or from in-game helps to straighten out this problem, and potentially give us more structure about the overall accounting of the 12000 years since the Sundering.

???? WU - The World Unsundered (WU), the Ancient era.
0 SW -> The Final Days, Hydaelyn axe-kicks Zodiark in the FACE, the star is sundered.
1 SW -> The Sundered World (SW) begins.
2000 SW -> The Thirteenth collapses, becoming the Void.
???? SW
1st Umbral Calamity
???? SW -> 1UE/AE 1
2nd Umbral Calamity
???? SW -> 2UE/AE 1
3rd Umbral Calamity
???? SW -> 3UE 1
5999 SW OR 6699 SW -> 3UE ends
6000 SW -> 3AE 1? <- Rise of the Allagan Empire, death of Xande, beginning of 300-year Golden Age
6700 SW -> 3AE 1? <- Miqo'te driven from Eorzea by the rise of the Allagan Empire
4th Umbral Calamity
7000 SW -> 4UE/AE 1 <- Azys Lla abandoned
8500 SW -> The Forgotten Age
5th Umbral Calamity
8501 SW -> 5UE 1 <- Seekers of the Sun return to Eorzea from Ilsabard via icebridges
8889 SW -> 5UE 388
8890 SW -> 5AE 1 <- Sanctum of the Twelve built in the Black Shroud
9190 SW -> 5AE 300 <- City-states arise in Eorzea
10139 -> 5AE 1250 <- The War of the Magi beings
10399 SW -> 5AE 1510 <- Mhach unleashes Diabolos on Amdapor, Diabolos sealed
6th Umbral Calamity
10400 SW -> 6UE 1
10422 SW -> 6UE 22
10423 SW -> 6AE 1
11995 SW -> 6AE 1572
7th Umbral Calamity
12000 SW -> 7AE 1 <- present day

So, I had a whole thing about how we should be looking for the events that signify the change of the calendar rather than the numbers, and a whole thing about how a bunch of those events are probably just not relevant enough to discuss, but I've noticed something in the EE1's timeline that maybe needs to be highlighted and discussed here.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Encyclopedia Eorzea 1, p. 47

Year 233 (Sixth Astral) - Sharlayan astrologer Lewphon pens The Five Ages--An Eorzean Chronology, an attempt to unify the independent calendars used by each of the city-states in the Fifth Astral Era.

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There's a few things this means, but most of them aren't especially relevant to the subject at hand. But most important is that the Age-based system of dating was external and largely retroactive. Nobody was declaring the end of the Fourth Umbral Era at the time, because they didn't even know what an Umbral Era was. In the events of the game declaring the Seventh Astral was nakedly political and arbitrary, but that's quite possibly also true of whatever lines Lewphon and other Sharlayans drew to declare the Eras in the first place, if they even exist; it's entirely possible that the fuzzy dating we have out-of-universe is also true in-universe, and there just isn't an agreed upon changeover moment for a lot of these.

The only changeover event that's actually declared is the start of the Sixth Astral, on the same page; that changeover comes from the 'frigid climes' brought by the flood subsiding; that doesn't feel like an especially specific event to me, sothe others might well be similar.

This is less about trying to identify the events than it is about taking the events that we KNOW and using the frame of references we have for them to find out the numbers. The discrepancy about how long it took for the Miqo'te to return to Eorzea is an example of how two pieces of information in the same source offer two incompatible continuities, because if they were gone for less than two thousand years it means one thing, but if the time difference between the rise of Allag and the 5UC is MORE than 2500 years, then one of these two bits of information is wrong.

And again, I can appreciate that because a lot of numbers are provided in text as "roughly this many" or "nearly this many" or "IMPRISONED FOR TEN THOUSAND YEARS, BANISHED FROM MY OWN HOMELAND" that finding something exact isn't going to be possible, but there are a LOT of numbers to talk about here.

Specific to the quote you mentioned about Lewphon, keep in mind that depending on when exactly you're looking into the 5AE, there's anywhere from three to thirteen city-states active at any one point in time. Attempting to rectify their individual calendars together, likely through a variety of historiographic methods, is kinda candy to historians, of COURSE they'd try to do that.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by unlimitedBLACK

Specific to the quote you mentioned about Lewphon, keep in mind that depending on when exactly you're looking into the 5AE, there's anywhere from three to thirteen city-states active at any one point in time. Attempting to rectify their individual calendars together, likely through a variety of historiographic methods, is kinda candy to historians, of COURSE they'd try to do that.

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Absolutely, there's nothing wrong with that, it's just something we should recognize as an element; that these dates will be deliberately artificial and impersonal rather than organic and defined by the people affected. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if we run into a 'Jesus was born about 5BC' problem and the changeover dates don't actually line up with the events that they were supposedly set for.