Who in game knows/knew that it's been 12k years since the sundering?

[SannaR]

Obviously Emet, Elidibus, Lahabreha Venat/Hydelean, the Watcher, and the loloprits would know. The other Ascians would be reminded any time they got re-uplifted to their seat. Hythlodaeus and those who were the fuel for Zodiark seemed to have been in stasis and quickly did the math once Fandaniel broke the bindings. Do the moogles sort of know since their mythos is they fled the heavens when during what gets labeled as the age of the gods came to an end due to them fighting each other?

Are there surviving records from the ages pre Allag? Or do those who rummage around Allagan ruins only know that the world is at least five thousand years post sundering? Is there an old musty book/scroll/tablet that gives something like a record stating a year of some sort like that one node in Ayzs La that said no one still had attended to the escaped great wyrm in five thousand years sitting around in either Old Sharlyean properly or Gabul that we haven't found yet?

Maybe we'll get a date from the 24man since we are supposed to be delving into the myths of the 12 and they seem to have been around forever even if the name they go by is an Eorzean thing.

[MikkoAkure]

The Forum in Sharlayan knows because they know what the Loporrits know. The Eorzea Encyclopedia also mentions the previous ages and gives them each a brief description. It is written from an in-universe point-of-view so I would assume some scholars know as well.

[Cleretic]

The Forum in Sharlayan knows because they know what the Loporrits know. The Eorzea Encyclopedia also mentions the previous ages and gives them each a brief description. It is written from an in-universe point-of-view so I would assume some scholars know as well.

The Encyclopedia Eorzea confirms that any Calamities prior to the one that took out Allag are of unknown timeframes and their elements are actually purely conjecture, so chances are pretty low it's a publicly known hypothesis. They just don't have the facts required to get to that point.

I'd actually think that, if there's any academics that 'know' about the Sundering, it might be scholars looking into the Ascians. They aren't exactly reliable sources of information, but presuming they're an actual field of study and interest (and it seems they are to some degree), then the experts in that field have probably heard their overall origin belief, although likely without actually believing it to be truth and more perceiving it as 'what this dangerous cult believes'.

There's also people who reach belief in the existence of that prior world not by clear evidence, but deduction. We see that in the Fisher Studium quests, actually: when an academic learns about Zodiark's destruction and the knock-on effects that brings, he does correctly deduce that those effects aren't completely new and are returning to a pre-Zodiark equilibrium. We end up directly proving him right, but the fact someone made that leap independently does suggest that people could at some point reach the truth not by being told, but by scientific analysis and deduction.

[MistakeNot]

Obviously Emet, Elidibus, Lahabreha Venat/Hydelean, the Watcher, and the loloprits would know. The other Ascians would be reminded any time they got re-uplifted to their seat. Hythlodaeus and those who were the fuel for Zodiark seemed to have been in stasis and quickly did the math once Fandaniel broke the bindings. Do the moogles sort of know since their mythos is they fled the heavens when during what gets labeled as the age of the gods came to an end due to them fighting each other?

Are there surviving records from the ages pre Allag? Or do those who rummage around Allagan ruins only know that the world is at least five thousand years post sundering? Is there an old musty book/scroll/tablet that gives something like a record stating a year of some sort like that one node in Ayzs La that said no one still had attended to the escaped great wyrm in five thousand years sitting around in either Old Sharlyean properly or Gabul that we haven't found yet?

Maybe we'll get a date from the 24man since we are supposed to be delving into the myths of the 12 and they seem to have been around forever even if the name they go by is an Eorzean thing.

Apart from those you list, few would even know anything about the sundering at all, and of those even fewer would know how long ago it was. Perhaps Midgardsormr, though he came to Hydaleyn after the sundering.
The moogles have myths that they climbed down from the heavens a long time ago - and the timespan isn't any more precise than that.

From the ages before Allag I think there is only myths and legends remaining. That which is left of Allag remains only because the Allagans were very high-tech and built to last. Compare how much remains of Allag, compared to the civilizations of Mhach, Amdapor, or Nym - all of which were far more recent than Allag, yet left less remains.

[Rongway]

That which is left of Allag remains only because the Allagans were very high-tech and built to last. Compare how much remains of Allag, compared to the civilizations of Mhach, Amdapor, or Nym - all of which were far more recent than Allag, yet left less remains.

I would suppose that this parallels a phenomenon that happened in the real world where as civilizations moved from stone carvings to paper, their records became less robust due to the properties of paper, until they reached an level of society interested especially in the preservation of antiquated media, or an even higher level of technology where they could store vast quantities of knowledge on flash drives and networked storage tomestones and data nodes. The three magi nations probably really liked their musty old tomes, which if not preserved properly from the start would fade or rot--especially since they met their ends at the calamitous flood.

[KageTokage]

I guess Allagan ruins are probably more durable then Ancient ruins given the suggestion that the latter had been effectively scoured from the Source by the calamities and the general ravages of time, though it's also possible they never actually had the time to fully recover and rebuild their civilization after the Final Days ravaged the world, meaning there may not have been many intact settlements/structures left to begin with.

[Iscah]

The Allagans were also a lot more widespread than the other civilisations, so we come across their ruins everywhere. The Mhachi and Amdapori ruins are often in good-but-neglected state, but only in a few specific locations.

Nym is in a worse state, but we have the implication that they were attacked by Ozma as the ruins inside it match pieces of the Wanderer's Palace.

Edit to add: Also the Floating City apparently wasn't floating at the time it was built, so having the ground beneath the city break up and float away wouldn't have done much good for the architecture either.

[Gemina]

I believe there is a period of time between the sundering and the first calamity leading to the first Astral era that is just a big 'ol blot of an undiscernible amount of time. The first calamity also did not happen until after one shard was lost to the void during the Ascians first attempt at a rejoining. After the first calamity was a time of a very primitive era on the source, wherein record keeping was pretty much constricted to cave wall paintings. Civilization on the source also regressed after the third calamity and the survivors in the 4th era elected to destroy as much historical knowledge as possible, which may very well be anything and everything that could truly determine how long the 4th era lasted.

IOW, the best that we can do is determine the least amount of time since the sundering. Paleontology in Eorzea isn't mentioned a whole lot from what I can recall, and how well this science has evolved in the 8th era would be crucial to truly investigate and determine the age of the source. Unsundered souls could definitely clue us in, but they're all kind of gone now.

[Cleretic]

I believe there is a period of time between the sundering and the first calamity leading to the first Astral era that is just a big 'ol blot of an undiscernible amount of time. The first calamity also did not happen until after one shard was lost to the void during the Ascians first attempt at a rejoining. After the first calamity was a time of a very primitive era on the source, wherein record keeping was pretty much constricted to cave wall paintings. Civilization on the source also regressed after the third calamity and the survivors in the 4th era elected to destroy as much historical knowledge as possible, which may very well be anything and everything that could truly determine how long the 4th era lasted.

IOW, the best that we can do is determine the least amount of time since the sundering. Paleontology in Eorzea isn't mentioned a whole lot from what I can recall, and how well this science has evolved in the 8th era would be crucial to truly investigate and determine the age of the source. Unsundered souls could definitely clue us in, but they're all kind of gone now.

We ourselves can math out a plausible series of figures for time between Calamities using the Encyclopedia Eorzea, which kinda stands to reason that in-universe scholars have probably deduced something roughly similar. The previous time between Calamities that we know of (specifically, Fourth through Seventh) range from one thousand to fifteen hundred years, so it can be reasonably deduced that the average time between Calamities is somewhere in that range. So the time between the First Calamity and the Seventh is somewhere between six and nine thousand years. But then deduce that there was a world before the first Calamity which would've needed that amount of lead time, and the age of the world as they know it ends up instead between seven and ten and a half thousand.

Knowing as we do that the Thirteenth was the result of a failed Rejoining we can then up the age to between eight thousand and twelve thousand, and suddenly we've reached the magic number that we know is how long since the Sundering, but the scholars may not know that about the Thirteenth, so it's hard to factor in.

And after all that reckoning, I think scholars would eventually reach the concept of 'the Zeroeth Umbral Calamity'; which is to say, the theoretical point the era before the First Calamity began. Now, whether it would be widely-held belief that the Zeroeth Calamity was an actual event and not a theoretical concept, I don't know, but I bet there's academics who've gotten most of the way towards the Sundering as a theory.