History of the Awakened World

Scholars of history on the World of the Long Sleep, know that the legacy they have inherited is but a fragment of the rich expanse of time and narrative which would have been their treasure and their joy had the Great Forgetting not stolen it away forever.
Of the long and intricate ages before that collective amnesia, so much has been lost that even the little that remains must be called into question since it exists in fragments only and without corroboration or evidence for its truth. Most choose to treat it as myth, no more reliable than the Legends Of Klane Kalonia at the end of the Season Of Innocence. They prefer to concentrate on the records that are available and to preserve and cultivate an understanding of our modern times. This they call the history of the awakened world.
The history of the awakened world has many peculiarities. The climate and even the very geology of the Earth has been reworked by intelligent agencies, although no one knows exactly how or why. Humans share their planet now, not only with the remnants of the original ecosystem of Earth but also with the so called Gene Sea, a seeding of many species from the wider galaxy supposedly introduced as a healing measure at the beginning of the Season of Innocence.
Modern history has proceeded in a series of stops and starts and with unnatural and uneven progress in all the fields of human endeavour, fostered mainly by the books preserved by the Order of the Silent Word and less obviously and predictably by some transference from the surviving remnants of the Enclaves. Often this has led to strange imbalances and mismatches in the way society is organised which could never have occured in a world dependent only on the rational progression of scientific study and development. For example, the rediscovery of fusion taps in 1050 AF came at a time when other forms of power production were still limited to wind, water and muscle, bypassing a whole slew of intermediate technologies that ought to have acted as stepping stones. This has been wonderful and frustrating in equal measure. Without a firm grasp of the principles behind ancient recovered knowledge, humankind can only have an imperfect idea of how it might be used and without the pyramid of dependent supporting technology they cannot exploit these ideas to their full potential. Consider that the fusion taps should have offered more energy than the entire world could imagine when the scholars at Anoomenon turned them on, yet for all the wonder that led to Anoomenon's new name as the Shining City, they remained little more than a curious form of lighting for many years until other technologies had caught up. There are dangers too, in experimenting with poorly understood concepts from the lost times. The Great Puncture disaster of 2112 AF is the best known example of these.
By broad consensus, the history of the awakened world is usually broken down into six ages:-

The Foundation Age	0 AF to 1622 AF
The Succession Empires	1623 AF to 1930 AF
The Trade Wars	1931 AF to 2208 AF
The Long Northern Peace	2209 AF to 2617 AF (of which the early years until 2530 AF are also called The Golden Age of Anoomenon)
The Role Disputes	2618 AF to 2940 AF
The Pax Helsporan	2941 AF to the current year of 3180 (the time of "A Gift from the Sea")

These are described more fully in the articles below. Click the "Timeline" button, near the bottom of this page to display a linear map of the entire history of the awakened world across all these ages.