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Do they ever show a timetable for when the Aspects were founded?

What about when each of the Phoenix Lords came on the scene?

Obviously, Asurmen was a legendary champion pre-Fall, but what about the others?

I believe that with the exception of Karandras, they were all his students.

What about Irylith? Or the Shining Spear founder?

Warp Spiders are a young aspect in fluff. Any idea where they came from? Was their founder from another Aspect?

And I'm more curious about the timetable. Did Asurmen train them right after the Fall? Were they around during the Great Crusade?

I think gw just doesn't want to bother with that many characters, but I'm sure they all trained under Asurmen excluding Karandaras who trained under Arhra. Asurmen was the first, then I think it was Jain Zar and beyond that I have no idea in what order they arrived in.

From what I know of eldar fluff. Asurmen was the first Aspect Warrior. In fact, he is the men that devised the entire philosophie behind Aspect Warrior training has a way for eldar to fight in wars without being corrupted by their dark impulse and falling to the lures of Chaos. He is also one of the pillar with several seers and philosophers of the way of life of the Craftworlds. He is one of the mastermind behind the concept of Life Path that is synonimous with Craftworld culture.

Before the Fall, eldars had no need for warriors. The Necron were defeated and the orks were regularly purged by their ships so they never reach the number necessary to become a threat to their empire. Their armies were composed of machines much like wraithguards and lords, but with no souls and completly controlled by the use of psychic commands.

After the Fall, using their psychic powers became very dangerous. Eldar gods were dead and Slaanesh tried (and still does) to consume their souls even before they died. With most of their most populated worlds swallowed by the Eye of Terror and the others either remote Exodite colonies or descending into chaos, those machines disapeared or became to dangerous to use. They needed a learn again how to fight for no living eldar on the Craftworlds really knew how to wage war or even fight properly.

Exodite returned to their roots of the War in Heaven of using a mix of psychic powers and martial abilities to fight with a emphasie on their connection with the spirit of their world to protect them from Slaanesh and her daemons. That's why they never leave their worlds and use only very primitive technologie compared to the other eldar culture.

Dark Eldars developped warriors out of necessity to provide themselves with souls to drink and pain to feed of. Their warriors developped from the murder cults that spead during the eldar empire's decadence and Slaanseh gestation.

There is no mention of who or what was Asurmen before being a warrior. He was probably some sort of philosopher or scholar. He realised that since using psychic powers was to dangerous and the concept of pure martial training was a quick way to damn an eldar soul, the only way to survive and fight wars was to learn how to divorce your mind and your soul to form a mask that would only represent a certain aspect of war has per the Aspects of Khaine hence the name of his future pupils. He explored that concept for a certain time, developped a fighting doctrine that would became that of the Dire Avengers, founded a first Temple on a Exodite world that he called the Temple of Azur.

There he started to trained his first pupil who became the first Phoenix Lords. At first, they were five of them: Jain Zar, Fuegan, Arhra, Barroth and Maugan Ra. Each learned how to create a «mask» based on a aspect of war that fitted their personnality best. Each developped a different martial art and philosophie all based on Asurmen teaching. They quickly started to have their own disciple and the Temple of Azur grew a lot. New temples based on the teachings of Asurmen and his first pupils spread rather quickly on several Craftworld. then gak went down.

Thetesis, Asurmen's brother, was killed by a major daemon and Asurmen died rather shortly after that. Arhra betrayed his mentor and friends and set out to destroy the Temple of Azur who was defended by Fuegan. The later died in the attack and Arhra disapeared with his disciples to found refuge and built a new temple in Commorragh. He was later killed by his own disciple in mysterious circomstances. Karandras was the only pupil of Arhra that remained true to the teachings of Asurmen and became the Phoenix Lord of the Stricking Scorpions. One by one, the first Phoenix Lords all died in various battles, but not before building numerous temples in almost all Craftworlds.

Phoenix Lords are the stuff of legend for eldars. They represent some of the best warriors their civilisation ever produced rivalling those of the War in Heaven era in might and skills. Though they all met their end on the battlefield at some point, their souls were so powerful they apparently are capable of taking over their armour and reincarnating themselves in times of need.

According to all this and the little timeline of the Fall vs the foundation of the Imperium, this is what we can affirm without to much fear of being wrong (developpement on the eldar's Fall would really be appreciated in my opinion). Asurmen developped his teaching about at the same time the Great Crusade started. There were almost no Aspect Warriors to attempt fighting off the Great Crusade armies. Thus, defeating the eldar was fairly easy just like the Emperor knew it would be. By the time of the Horus Heresy, Asurmen's disciples were already spreading their teaching to the Craftworlds. The betrayal of Arhra came shortly after the Horus Heresy and most Phoenix Lords died, almost all fighting either Arhra or powerful daemons, in a relatively short period of time. In the first millenum of 30K, their were only a few aspects (Dire Avengers, Banshees, Striking Scorpions, Swooping Hawks, Fire Dragons and Dark Reapers). These are also the only aspect common on all Craftworlds.

The others were created later from students of Asurmen teachings, but not necessarly directly under him. For exemple, the Warp Spiders were created by taking has inspiration tiny psychic creature that feed on non eldar psychic energy. The eat daemons or other similar creatures that would like to feed off the rich souls that each Craftworld Infinity Core holds. Shinning Spear are one of the rarest Aspect and were developped by taking for inspiration Asuryan Spear. there is no mention of when exatly they were created, but we know it was after all the others and certainly after the destruction of the Temple of Azur.

We will need to wait for more fluff to be written before we can be sure of it.

There is a little more fleshed out, but that helps a lot.

(Asurmem was a champion before The Fall. The Crystal Sons of Asuran were trained by Asurmen himself, before Asuran destroyed them during a time of peace. So Asurmen must have been a great champion pre-heresy.)

(Also, in modern fluff, when an Exarch 'dies', a new Eldar puts on the armor. The Exarch remains the Exarch, but is an amalgamation of all Eldar to have worn the armor. Usually, for an Exarch, the new person tends to be the dominant personality, but they are fully merged. For a Phoenix Lord, though, the new person is fully subsumed into the psyche of the Phoenix Lord.)

Is a Phoenix Lord's suit so powerful because they are a Phoenix Lord, or is a 'Phoenix Lord' 'simply' the natural progression of an Exarch after about 10 thousand years?

So would Exarchs all be equally skilled, or do exarch continue to get better, with Phoenix Lords simply being the best of them.

I would say the latter, but on a massive scale. An Exarch of an older shrine will be more powerful then an Exarch of a new one because of the amount of souls within each conglomerate spirit. Each spirit would bring something new and unique to the being, so the Exarch gains all the best possible qualities and techniques of every soul within it.

Phoenix Lords are similar, but on a colossal scale. Each P.L has been killed and rezzed hundreds of times if not thousands, they will have a depth of knowledge unrivaled by other Exarchs. More importantly though, remember every Eldar is an iota level Psyker, what do you think happens when hundreds of Psyker souls are in one place? Each Phoenix Lord contains enough souls to act as a miniature infinity circuit, letting them tap into a latent psykic well. This is where there 'supernatural' powers come from, Fuegan burning people he looks at or Karandras literately stepping from shadow to shadow.

So IMHO the power and skill of an Exarch is measured in generations, not age.

There are errors above.

First, the Aspect of the Shining Spears was created by the Phoenix Lord Drastanta, the Tempest of Starlight, as per the Iyanden supplement. Drastanta was armed with the Celestial Lance and was the one that avenged Asurmen's first incarnation, who had fallen in battle against the Keeper of Secrets N'kari during the destruction of Asur. Again this is as per the Iyanden supplement. Asur was not an Exodite world. It was described as a barren world.

Irillyth was one of the Asurya, and hence one of Asurmen's direct pupils. So far as we know, all the Asurya became Phoenix Lords, but Phoenix Lords do not necessarily have to be Asurya, as evidenced by Karandras.

Initially it seems there might have been some fluidity to the concept of the Aspects, which are really just mythological constructs. For example, Arhra and Karandras seemed to have different conceptions of the Scorpion, with Karandras focusing on stealth, whereas Arhra seemed to be more about pure killing power since it says Karandras tempered his predecessor's murderous nature with the patience of the hunter. After Arhra's break with the other Asurya, Karandras's vision for the Scorpion seems to have supplanted Arhra's original idea. In "modern" 40K, the idea of each Aspect seems to have become more crystallized.

Gav Thorpe is apparently writing a new Eldar novel focused on Asurmen.

Also:

The Birth of the Reapers

When Asurmen, the first and oldest among the Phoenix Lords, taught his brethren the arts of war it was the Harvester of Souls that fell furthest from the fold. He recognised the fact that the Fall had decimated the Eldar race, and that their numbers could never reach the peaks that they had once scaled. Together with one of his brothers who is now lost to even the long memeory of the Eldar, he believed that no matter their skill, the Eldar could not match the teeming hordes of Ork and Human, man for man and blade for blade. With this in mind, he fashioned great baroque weapons from purest wraithbone, just as Asurmen had taught him. But these were not the swords or scimitars of his brothers. Each of the weapons Maugan Ra created were great cannons capable of spitting death into the ranks of the foe from leagues away. As his craft progress, Maugan Ra learnt that even a great cannon could be used as subtly as a scalpel, and strove for power twinned with precision. This led to the creation of the Maugetar, and later to the philosophy of the Dark Reaper Aspect [as] (sic) a whole.

WD 284

So it seems that the majority of the Phoenix Lords still end up creating Aspects that are focused around individual skill, close combat, or short ranged individualized shooting as compared to the Reaper's long ranged massed impersonal "reaping" of foes.