Hyborian Age timeline

[Faraer]

"The Hyborian Age" seems to put 4500 years between the Cataclysm and the fall of the Hyborian civilization. But "The Scarlet Citadel" and "Black Colossus" have the Hyborians moving south to found Koth 3000 years in the past, when per my reading of "The Hyborian Age" they're still settling in the north. As well, Roy Thomas and Walt Simonson seemed to find 7000 years between the Cataclysm and the fall of the Hyborians.

I know a lot of people have thought about these things before, so I wonder if anyone can shed any light before I entangle myself further. I've read and liked some of Dale Rippke's essays, though they don't go much into dates.

As a second point, I'm wondering where Solomon Kane's fetish staff might have been during the Hyborian Age...

 

[Faraer]

And I wonder how we place the James Allison stories "Marchers of Valhalla", "The Valley of the Worm", and "The Garden of Fear", in which the Æsir make great migrations some time in the Hyborian Age. The use of hide tents and flint or bronze weapons seems to place them before Conan's time. But Dale puts "Marchers" near the end of the Hyborian Age. When, also, did the battle of Jotunheim (mentioned in "Valley") occur?

 

[Faraer]

This is how the dating of "The Hyborian Age" seems to me: dates are from the Cataclysm, numbers in square brackets are page refs to The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian.

Pre-Cataclysmic Age [381–2]
0: Cataclysm: Atlantis and Lemuria sink, Pictish Islands heaved up. Continental Picts and Atlanteans survive. Lemurians escape to eastern coast of Thurian Continent, enslaved by the ancient race there. Proto-Hyborians flee north, drive the snow-apes north. [382–3]
500: Pictish–Atlantean wars end. Lesser cataclysm; creates inland sea. [382–3]
1500: Lemurians have risen and destroyed their masters, who came west, overthrew the giant-kings, founded Stygia. Hyborians have spread over the north; begin to drift southward [383–4]
2000: Hyborians sweep south. Descendants of Zhemri revive. Sons of Shem wander east of Stygia. Agriculture evolved in valley of Zingg. Hyperborea has come into being. [384–5]
2000–3000: Rise of the Hyborian kingdoms. Koth founded. Zamora founded. Zingara founded after influx of Picts then Hybori. [385]
3000–3500: Stygians driven south of the Styx. [385–6]
3500: The kingdoms of the world are defined: the Hyborian kingdoms, Zamora, Zingara, Stygia, Cimmeria, Picts [385–6]
3500–4000: Æsir and Vanir in Nordheim. Lemurians emerge as Hyrkanians, establish Turan. [386]
4000: Hyborian civilization enters its height (Conan stories) [386–7]
4500: Fall of Hyborian civilization [387–97]

What am I missing in the essay? I want it to gel with other dates such as the fall of Acheron, also about '3000 years ago', in The Hour of the Dragon.

 

[The King]

Where would you put the Acheronian Empire? I think it existed 3000 years before Conan (from what we learn in the Hour of the Dragon).

 

[Darkstorm]

Well, in order to place the datings according to ALL of Howard's Conan material, you need to add some other stuff not found in "The Hyborian Age".

Pre-Cataclysmic Age [381–2]
0: Cataclysm: Atlantis and Lemuria sink, Pictish Islands heaved up. Continental Picts and Atlanteans survive. Lemurians escape to eastern coast of Thurian Continent, enslaved by the ancient race there. Proto-Hyborians flee north, drive the snow-apes north. [382–3]
500: Pictish–Atlantean wars end. Lesser cataclysm; creates inland sea. [382–3]
1000: Acheron founded by the children of the Giant-Kings.
1500: Lemurians have risen and destroyed their masters, who came west, overthrew the giant-kings, founded the "human" kingdom of Stygia. Hyborians have spread over the north; begin to drift southward [383–4]
2000: Hyborians sweep south. Descendants of Zhemri revive. Sons of Shem wander east of Stygia. Agriculture evolved in valley of Zingg. Hyperborea has come into being. [384–5]
2000-2500: Zamora founded. Stygia expands into the lands settled by the Shemites, and lays claim to the lands east of the growing empire of Acheron. Zingara's aboriginal inhabitants absorbed by a Pictish influx.
2500–3000: Hyborian tribes settle in the lands under Stygian rule. Hyborian tribes settle the strip of land that exists between Acheron and the Pictish and Cimmerian wilderness. The first Hyborian nations (Koth, Ophir, and Corinthia) are founded, but remain under Stygia's domination. Zingara founded after a tribe of Hybori conquer and absorb the region's inhabitants. [385]
3000–3500: Koth, Ophir and Corinthia successfully rebel against Stygia and sack Kuthchemes. The nation of Acheron falls under the combined weight of a Hyborian invasion. Aquilonia, Nemedia, Argos and Brythunia are founded. Koth flexs its might and drives the Stygians south of the Styx. [385–6]
3500: The kingdoms of the world are defined: the Hyborian kingdoms, Zamora, Zingara, Stygia, Cimmeria, Picts [385–6]
3500–4000: Æsir and Vanir in Nordheim. Lemurians emerge as Hyrkanians, establish Turan. [386]
4000: Hyborian civilization enters its height [386–7]
5000: Kothic adventurers carve the small kingdoms of Khauran and Khoraja out of the Shemitish lands to the southeast of Koth
6000(approx) Conan becomes King of Aquilonia.
6500: Fall of Hyborian civilization [387–97]

A predominance of the non-"Hyborian Age" source material comes from "Black Colossus" and "Hour of the Dragon". The "Hyborian Age" essay was written when Howard first began to write the Conan stories, and while it can be used as a guide to the world, some of it's datings were superseded by history that Howard established in later stories. It can't be thought of as "written in stone".

"The Garden of Fear" probably takes place sometime around 3500, when the Aesir first come wandering down from the north, probably in some small, out of the way valley that the Hyborians avoided. I don't have my copy of WOLFSHEAD handy, so I can't properly reference the battle of Jotunheim.

"Marchers of Valhalla" takes place after the fall of Hyboria, at the time the Ice Age begins, presumably around 6800.

"The Valley of the Worm" takes place after the Ice Age is well underway and most of the civilized world has collapsed into chaos, 7000-7500 approx.

Only Howard could tell you where Kane's fetish staff was during the Hyborian Age, and I'm betting that he won't tell you short of having a medium channel his spirit...

 

[The King]

most excellent chronology. Don't forget the Thurian Age (with king Kull) that should have happened approximately around -2000 as the stories occur 8000 years before the time of Conan.

 

[Faraer]

Aha, thanks. You make the timeline work by the sleight of adding 2000 years near the end. That makes Epemitreus's dates fit better too, and allows Turan to be 'ancient' in "The Hyborian Age". I'm not familiar with the Hour of the Dragon material as I've put off rereading it till The Bloody Crown of Conan.

From "The Valley of the Worm":

It was so long ago that the cradle-land of my race was still in Nordheim. But the epic drifts of my people had already begun, and blue-eyed, yellow-maned tribes flowed eastward and southward and westward, on century-long treks that carried them around the world and left their bones and their traces in strange lands and wild waste places. On one of these drifts I grew from infancy to manhood. My knowledge of that northern homeland was dim memories, like half-remembered dreams, of blinding white snow-plains and ice fields, of great fires roaring in the circle of hide tents, of yellow manes flying in great winds, and a sun setting in a lurid wallow of crimson clouds, blazing on trampled snow where still dark forms lay in pools that were redder than the sunset.

That last memory stands out clearer than the others. It was the field of Jotunheim, I was told in later years, whereon had just been fought that terrible battle which was the Armageddon of the Æsirfolk, the subject of a cycle of hero-songs for long ages, and which still lives today in dim dreams of Ragnarok and Goetterdaemmerung.

Jotunheim being 'giantland'. 3500 seems a good date, though it's not really defined. I like Kurt Busiek's extension of Nordheimer religion with Buri, Bor and Audhambla.

Howard imagines both the Nordics and the Hyborians as virile proto-Aryans, and so has them both do these great migrations, mentioning those of the Hybori in "The Hyborian Age", those of the Æsir in the James Allison stories (of which I haven't yet tracked down the fragments).

And Kull's driving out the serpent-people is emotionally similar to Solomon driving out the djinn, mentioned in "The Footfalls Within". Of course we can't definitively place Solomon Kane's staff in the Hyborian Age, but it's a terrific hook for roleplaying. Retrieve it from the tomb of Atlantean or Acheronian kings... a Shemitish hunter of evil with a pointed stave...

Dale, would you like to tell us the subjects of the two new essays in your book, "Omega Hyboria" and "The Age of Fire and Ice"?

King, how do you figure the gap between Kull's time and the Cataclysm?

 

[The King]

King, how do you figure the gap between Kull's time and the Cataclysm?

Simple: The (my) City of Wonder was already very old when Kull was crowned. It was built on the foundations of another city.
The first paragraph of the Hyborian Age states :

"...Of that epoch known by the Nemedian chroniclers as the Pre-Cataclysmic Age, little is known except the later part and that is veiled in the mists of legendry. Known history begins with the waning of the Pre-Cataclysmic civilization, dominated by the kingdoms of Kamelia, Valusia (My kingdom), Verulia, Grondor, Thule and Commoria. These people spoke a similar language, arguing a common origin. There were other kingdoms, equally civilized but inhabited by different and apparently older races...."

The 2nd paragraph reminds us of the other continents and other civilizations, of human and pre-human origin, and then the 3rd paragraph describes the time before the cataclysm:

"The Thurian civilization was crumbling; their armies were composed largely of barbarians mercenaries. Picts, Atlanteans and Lemurians were their generals, their statesmen, often their kings (direct reference to Kull). Of the bickerings of the kingdoms and the wars between Valusia and Commoria, as well as the conquests by which the Atlanteans founded a kingdom on the mainland, there were more legends than accurate history."
There is no mention of the later sentence in Kull stories, only that the Atlanteans had a small outpost.

So when I tell 6000 years before Conan this is an approximation that I computed by adding the years (centuries) given by Howard in the Hyborian Age until one reaches the epoch of Conan.

I love the Kull stories because there is no magic, just common tricks (ventriloquism for the talking cat). However many artefacts or locations are saturated with magic and are often of non-human origins.
This is thus a clear proof that Howardian magic comes from pre-human civilization.
As for the people that would become Stygians: they came and conquered an old prehuman civilization and absorbed their customs and probably learnt from their magic because they weren't Set worshippers before coming there.
I'm pretty sure that the magic used in the Hyborian Age (Conan time) stems from such older races because it isn't common magic and only learned scholars well versed in old languages can understand it.

 

[Orkin]

Got a related question: The time of Conan's Hyborian Age is commonly given as 10,000 years in the past. How do we derive this from the original chronicle?

Is it just a nice big round number?

 

[Darkstorm]

Ok, I'm going to use this post to answer two questions in one fell swoop.

The two essays in THE HYBORIAN HERESIES are unique to that book and have never shown up anywhere but there. "Omega Hyboria" is pretty self-explainatary; it's my look at the fall of Hyborian civilization. "The Age of Fire and Ice" covers the last bit in Howard's "The Hyborian Age" essay; how the effects of the ice age destroyed everything and set up the world that is familiar to us.

"The Age of Fire and Ice" relates my view of the 10,000 BC dating (which is actually 12,000 years in the past). Since I don't particularly feel like revisiting all of the points I made in this essay, I'm going to excerpt the bit that deals with this question. Consider it a preview of the essay...

The last thing I want to touch upon is the theory that the Hyborian Age existed 12,000 years ago, ending in 10,000 B.C. I’m not quite sure when this theory began, but the first mention I can find of it is in the book introductions of the Lancer Conan series. So, it probably originated with Howard scholar, L. Sprague DeCamp. I assume he used this date because it seemed reasonably distant. Unfortunately, it totally ignores the information that Howard gives in his essay that would place a date on the Hyborian Age.

We must bear in mind that the most recent Ice Age began 35,000 years ago and didn’t end until 11,500 years ago. The DeCamp dating is a complete fantasy, as it would place the Hyborian Age during the height of the Ice Age. Howard is pretty specific as to when various events occur that could pin it to what we know of the Ice Age.

We know that approximately a thousand years after the reign of King Conan the Ice Age began in the Nordheimr lands and slowly spread southward. It’s also a reasonable assumption that because of the position of the North Pole on the Nameless Continent that the Ice Age began in the west approximately several millennia prior to its appearance in proto-Europe (several Howard tales imply that the Nameless Continent was mostly uninhabitable).

I figure that it’s roughly 6500 years between the Great Cataclysm and the beginning of the Ice Age in the Hyborian lands. So how do we go about this?

Well, the last Ice Age began 35,000 years ago or circa 33,000 B.C. If the Ice Age took two millennia to reach Europe, that would make it roughly 31,000 B.C. Sixty-five hundred years prior to that would place the Great Cataclysm at circa 37,500 B.C. It all seems rather straightforward.

Are you ready to hear something weird? According to an article in the December 1998 issue of Discover magazine titled “A Global Winter’s Tale”, the human race suffered a “population bottleneck”; an event that greatly reduced the human race’s genetic variation to roughly 10,000 people. Scientists believe that this “bottleneck” for the Earth’s population took place roughly 40,000 years ago; i.e. 38,000 B.C. The article theorizes that the eruption of a “super-volcano” caused the mass extinction of man due to a global winter.
Isn’t it an interesting bit of synchronicity that Robert Howard placed the Great Cataclysm at nearly the same time as a real world-wide catastrophe. He really seems to have his mind linked to past events.

Using the 40,000 year old “bottleneck” as our benchmark, we find that:

38,000 B.C. = The Great Cataclysm
37,500 B.C. = The Lesser Cataclysm
35,500 B.C. = The destruction of Acheron, Hyborian Age begins
33,000 B.C. = The Ice Age begins on the Nameless Continent
32,500 B.C. = The reign of king Conan
31,900 B.C. = The death of Gorm, Hyborian Age ends
31,500 B.C. = The first appearance of the Ice Age in Nordheim
28,000 B.C. = Pole Shift Cataclysm, Cro-Magnon invasion
18,000 B.C. = High point of the Ice Age (Glacial Maximum)
9,500 B.C. = Ice Age ends

I admit that 20,000 years between the end of the Hyborian Age and the end of the Ice Age (sparking the beginnings of our civilizations) seems to be pretty formidable length of time to wrap our minds around. But other Howard tales (Skull-face, Men of the Shadows, The Moon of Skulls, The Gods of Bal-Sagoth, Worms of the Earth) indicate that some pretty interesting stuff was happening in Europe during this time period, while "The Hyborian Age" relegates pretty-much everybody into residing along the shores of the Caspian Sea. Figuring out how that all fits together may be the germ of some future project. :wink:

 

[The King]

Darkstorm, there is (only) one thing I can't agree with (or better that I am uncomfortable with): there is a mere 2,500 years span between the great Cataclysm and the end of Acheron.
In your You essay "The Mystery of the Great Cataclysm" you give 3 possible cause of which I personaly consider the "Dynamic Axis Theory" as the best.
However considering the great cataclysm leads to the destruction of the Thurian continent, the mass of dust and particles projected in the atmosphere should have lead to an quasi immediate Ice Age on the whole surface of the planet. I can then hardly imagine the Acheron Empire thriving so soon, all the more as Koth, Ophir and Corinthia also exist (because they were annexed by Acheron).
Howard says there is very little info on that period but we know that

"... many Lemurians escaped to the eastern coast of the Thurian Continent ... where they were enslaved by the ancient race which already dwelt there and their history, for thousands of years, is a history of brutal servitude."

Thousands of years later, the slaves would rebel and destroy their "masters" building a new civilization on the ruins of that of the vanquished (emergence of Khitaï). These surviving masters flee to the west and reach a mysterious land and non-human civilization which they utterly destroy and absorb (emergence of the Stygians).
Acheron and Stygia were at war for the control of Koth for a long time, then the Stygians eventually lost their influence on Koth but also the land that would become known as Shem. This history is taking place long before the migration of the Hyborian tribes.
As the latter are responsible for the destruction of Acheron, I am not sure that all the events I mentioned above took place in only 2,500 years. I am pretty certain there is a long time shrouded in the mist of history caused by the chaos resulting immediatly from the cataclysm as well as by the lack of knowledge on that period.
Howard says that this is more the stuff of legends then of known facts which means that the Hyborian tribes were illiterate at the beginning and kept no written records. They probably burned all the archives they found considering them as the source of outmost evil.
Hence this "gap" in human history.

 

[Faraer]

Going by HA, BC and HD, the fall of Acheron happens about 3000 years, rather than 2500, after the Cataclysm: both that fall and the defeat of the northern Stygian kingdom are said to happen 'three thousand years ago', and HA dates the latter to around 3000.

Though I found Dale's application of paleogeography to Howard's work interesting and fruitful, I wouldn't go so far as to alter Howard's dates to fit what science says would have happened. The plural 'thousands of years' does contradict the 1000 dating for the start of Acheron -- which I can't comment on till I reread HD -- but it's easier to gloss over it for the purposes of the timeline I'm working up.

 

[Orkin]

...The DeCamp dating is a complete fantasy...

Imagine that... :wink:

I admire your work, but I have a problem that kind of distant dating, since it pretty well cancels any relations of the various Hyborian peoples to modern nations, as described in REH's Hyborian Age.

 

[Faraer]

It would be interesting to know when 1920s/30s Ice Age theories dated the last one, and what exact sources REH had (rehupa.com).

Dale, I'm not quite seeing your reasoning behind dating of the James Allison stories. "Marchers" takes place when "the yellow-haired folk still dwelt in Nordheim ... before the great drifts of my race had peopled the world" -- that is, before the glacier ages and the great Nordic drift (which depeopled Nordheim). "Garden" seems to be set similarly. "Valley" takes place when "the epic drifts of my people had already begun, and blue-eyed, yellow-maned tribes flowed eastward and southward and westward", i.e. after the start of the Ice Age, but "the cradle-land of my race was still in Nordheim", so the Ice Age can only just have started. Maybe the battle of Jotunheim, which immediately precedes "Valley", is the last battle of Æsir and Vanir as the glacier age sets in.

And the absence in these stories of Hyborians, Picts, and Hyrkanians is perplexing, given that they were written after most of the Conan stories. Who are the peaceful brown-skinned people seen in "Garden" and mentioned in "Marchers"?

 

[Orkin]

It would be interesting to know when 1920s/30s Ice Age theories dated the last one, and what exact sources REH had (rehupa.com).

Excellent approach.

 

[The King]

And the absence in these stories of Hyborians, Picts, and Hyrkanians is perplexing, given that they were written after most of the Conan stories. Who are the peaceful brown-skinned people seen in "Garden" and mentioned in "Marchers"?

I can't remember well but the Picts have a dark complexion even if Howard says they are a white race. The Valley of the Worms is set in the Pict Wilderness.

 

[Faraer]

Yeah. These guys aren't Picts, though: they're slender, peace-loving, and agricultural. I don't think "Valley" is in the main Pictish wilderness: "this particular tribe represented the easternmost drift of the race... they had dwelt in these environs only a few generations... then there were no blacks among those hills. In later years they came up from the south..."

Dale, do you know if Wandering Star is going to publish Howard's third Hyborian map?

 

[Darkstorm]

Wow, you guys have a lot of questions today!

The answers, in no particular order...

Howard's main source material for the historical datings of his fictional world was:
The Prehistoric World: or, Vanished Races, by E. A. Allen, published in 1885. This book advances the notion that the Ice Age ended about 80,000 years ago. It's kind of strange to read, as the historical parts of it are quite similar to Howard's "The Hyborian Age" in tone.

***************************************

While I agree that a "nuclear winter" scenario makes a great deal of sense, it is actually a "modern-day" theory. Howard has his post-cataclysmic world warming up instead of cooling down. Since his world isn't suffering from "Nuclear winter", the peoples of the world aren't at so much of a disavantage.

Robert Yaple seemed to feel that Acheron existed for about 2,500 years in an article he wrote back in the 70's. I don't really have a problem with the length of time that he feels Acheron existed. My main problem with Yaple's theory is that he has Stygia founding Acheron after the prehuman kingdom is overthrown. My research doesn't show that to be the case. Acheron was founded prior to the Stygians leaving the east. If Yaple's datings are to be believed, then that's were Roy Thomas got his 7,000 year date from.

***************************

"... many Lemurians escaped to the eastern coast of the Thurian Continent ... where they were enslaved by the ancient race which already dwelt there and their history, for thousands of years, is a history of brutal servitude."

Wow, I never noticed this inconsistency before! By Howard's datings in "The Hyborian Age" the Lemurians were enslaved for about 1500 years. That doesn't quite seem to fit the idea of "thousands of years of brutal servitude". Interesting...

*************************

In all honesty, Howard placed his prehistoric world between 'the sinking of Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Aryas'. Now according to Plato, Atlantis sank about 9,500BC while the Aryan migrations were thought in the 30's to have began around 1,500BC. So Howard felt that the Hyborian Age existed during that 8,000 year period. Actually, his "Hyborian Age" essay fits into that period of time to a tee. As Faraer shows, the essay only covers 4500 years between the Great Cataclysm and the fall of Hyboria. That means Howard's little pole shift following the fall is probably supposed to reflect the biblical "Deluge" that was thought to happen around 2500BC. It's a pretty cool way to look at it, although he had to screw it up by writing stories that contradict his own timeline. :wink:

The march of history and the advent of carbon-dating has pretty much made a hash of Howard's version of prehistory (which I'm sure is why deCamp moved it to around 10,000BC).

On an alternate dating take, "Kings of the Night" claims that Kull's Thurian Age existed around 100,000BC. If the Hyborian Age followed the Thurian Age the way Howard's essay states, then it totally cancels any relations of the various Hyborian peoples to modern nations.

In my opinion, the mistake that Howard made was trying to graft the Thurian Age onto the beginning of the Hyborian Age. If he had left the Thurian Age at 100,000BC, then I think that there would be no contradictions between the various stories that he wrote (Kull's Atlantis would be an earlier age of the Atlantis that appears in "Skull-face", "Men of the Shadows", and most importantly, in "The Moon of Skulls".

Food for thought...

 

[Faraer]

Aha. An etext of The Prehistoric World: or, Vanished Races can be found here.

We can probably agree that Howard's prehistory is a fictional device that should not ultimately be judged by or changed to fit whatever the latest understanding of actual prehistory happens to be. Similarly, science fiction does not try to literally predict the future, and it's not invalidated when the world doesn't do what it says.

A general point: I do find this kind of thinking fun, but I agree with Ron Edwards that freewheeling making-it-up-as-you-go-along is really how you want to GM sword & sorcery, rather than as literary archaeology. I like to have a foundation to work from when making stuff up, and knowing the shape of Hyborian Age history is a help to improvising. All the online timelines are of Conan's career, rather than about geological, historical, ethnological, and cultural events.

 

[Orkin]

Good points all! What do we call this field: pseudoscience, pseudohistory, pseudoarchaeology? :lol: That is, "treating disproved sciences as if they were still validated for purposes of filling out a fantasy world."

We're working on pseudolinguistics in my land... :roll: