Calendar

Vareth’s standard historical chronology is based on an elven system of year-reckoning that became widely adopted by scholars, diplomats, merchants, and record keepers across the continent.

It is used as the common dating system in historical records even where local calendars remain in everyday use.

The Historical Calendar

The calendar begins with AF 1, the first year of the Age of Foundations.

AF 1 does not mark the beginning of civilization, writing, kingdoms, or long-distance contact. Those developments are considerably older.

Instead, it marks the point from which surviving records across multiple regions can be compared with enough reliability to support a continuous continental chronology.

Elven archives played a central role in establishing this system. Their long-lived record traditions, astronomical observations, genealogies, treaties, and preserved regional accounts provided particularly strong chronological anchors when records from different peoples and states were compared.

The resulting chronology is elven in origin but is not exclusively elven in use.

Local Calendars

Many peoples, cultures, religions, cities, and states maintain their own calendars.

These may count years from dynastic accessions, migrations, religious events, military victories, the founding of settlements, astronomical cycles, or other locally important events.

Dwarven holds often preserve their own long-running systems of dating. Human states frequently maintain royal, civic, or religious calendars. Other peoples likewise use systems shaped by their own histories and traditions.

Historical scholarship converts these dates into the common chronology when reliable comparison is possible.

Pre-Foundation Dating

Events before AF 1 cannot usually be assigned exact years.

The closer an event lies to AF 1, the more surviving records can be compared and the narrower its estimated date may become. Deep prehistory is reconstructed primarily through archaeology, geology, surviving structures, biological evidence, and much later written traditions.

Approximate dates are therefore expressed relative to AF 1.

For example:

c. 2,100 years before AF 1

The abbreviation c. indicates that the date is approximate.

Very ancient periods may be given broad ranges rather than individual dates when greater precision cannot be supported.

The Ages

Vareth’s connected historical chronology is divided into four major Ages:

1. Age of Foundations
2. Age of Realms
3. Age of Sundering
4. Age of Crowns

The periods before AF 1 are collectively treated as pre-Foundation history rather than as an additional formal Age.

The boundaries between Ages mark major historical transitions rather than changes to the underlying calendar itself.