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Is there any legit knowledgeable person here who has read how much the Imperium knows about Old Earth? As far as I know, they know very little. We can barely keep track of records from 2,000 years ago in our world. SO the Imperium would have it harder, especially since most were destroyed in the Age of Strife.

The Emperor knows everything about human history, as he has displayed.


The Last Church said:

"Revelation snapped his fingers. 'That's exactly my point. You pick and choose which bits of your book to take literally and which to read as symbolic, and that choosing is a matter of personal decision, not divinity. Trust me, in ages past, a frightening number of people took their holy books absolutely literally, causing untold misery and death because they truly believed the words they read. The history of religion is a horror story, Uriah, and if you doubt it, just look at what humanity has done in the name of their gods over the millennia. Thousands of years ago, a bloody theocracy that venerated a feathered-serpent god rose in the Mayan jungles. To appease this vile god, its priests drowned maidens in sacred wells and cut out the hearts of children. They believed this serpent god had an earthly counterpart and the temple builders drove the first pile through a maiden's body to pacify this non-existent creature.'Uriah turned to Revelation in horror and said, 'You can't seriously compare my religion to such heathen barbarism?''Can't I?' countered Revelation. 'In the name of your religion, a holy man launched a war with the battle cry of "Deus Vult", which means "god wills it" in one of the ancient tongues of Old Earth. His warriors were charged with destroying enemies in a far-off kingdom, but first they fell upon those in their own lands who opposed the war. Thousands were dragged from their homes and hacked to death or burned alive. Then, satisfied their homeland was secure, the zealous legions plundered their way thousands of miles to the holy city they were to liberate. Upon reaching it, they killed every inhabitant to "purify" the symbolic city of taint. I remember one of their leaders saying that he rode in blood up to the knees and even to his horse's bridle, by the just and marvellous judgement of god.''That is ancient history,' said Uriah. 'You cannot vouchsafe the truth of events so lost in the mists of time.''If it were one event, I might agree with you,' replied Revelation, 'but just a hundred or so years later, another holy man declared war on a sect of his own church. His warriors laid siege to the sect's stronghold in ancient Franc, and when the city fell his generals asked their leader how they might tell the faithful from the traitor among the captives. This man, who followed your god, ordered the warriors to "Kill them all. God will know His own". Nearly twenty thousand men, women and children were slaughtered. Worst of all, the hunt for any that had escaped the siege led to the establishment of an organisation known as the Inquisition, a dreadful, monstrous plague of hysteria that gave its agents free rein to stretch, burn, pierce and break their victims on fiendish pain machines to force them to confess to disbelief and identify fellow transgressors. Later, with most of their enemies hunted down and killed, the Inquisition shifted its focus to wychcraft, and priests tortured untold thousands of women into confessing that they engaged in unnatural acts with daemons. They were then burned or hanged for their confessions and this hysteria raged for three centuries in a dozen nations, a madness that saw whole towns exterminated and over a hundred thousand dead.'"

https://www.amazon.com/Tales-Heresy-Horus-Nick-Kyme/dp/1844166821

https://www.amazon.com/Tales-Heresy-Horus-Nick-Kyme/dp/1844166821






I read Mark of Calth. And it looks like even people during the Great Crusade did not know about Old Earth. Perpetual Oll Persson tells Katt and the other people with him about his time on Old Earth, and they were none the wiser about human history before that.

https://www.amazon.com/Calth-Horus-Heresy-Laurie-Goulding/dp/1849705755

https://www.amazon.com/Calth-Horus-Heresy-Laurie-Goulding/dp/1849705755

https://www.amazon.com/Know-No-Fear-Horus-Heresy/dp/1849701350

https://www.amazon.com/Know-No-Fear-Horus-Heresy/dp/1849701350




And its a fact the Emperor was born in Anatolia, as the lore from 1st Edition Rogue Trader shows (if you still think it is accurate to current lore http://imgur.com/dImnK6j

http://imgur.com/dImnK6j

https://spikeybits.com/2018/01/nurgles-lost-the-damned-realms-of-chaos.html



http://www.belloflostsouls.net/2014/06/40k-retro-corner-realm-of-chaos-lost-and-the-damned.html ), and as Horus says in Horus Rising on pages 354-355. But that's not the question. My question is how much the Imperium knows about Old Earth.



https://www.amazon.com/Horus-Rising-Heresy-Dan-Abnett/dp/1849707448

One of the jobs of the Order of Sigilites is to preserve history. In one of the HH short stories, a group of Malcador's agents retrieve a sealed container from some Chaos worshipers. Opening it, the leader is angry to discover it is just a lump of rock and nearly jettisons it but eventually follows his orders to bring it back to Terra. Malcador then explains that it is the Rosetta stone and explains some of its significance.

So there are people who still are interested in ancient history but they are a small and academic minority with little relevance to day-to-day Imperial Citizens. We know Malcador does not survive the Siege but we don't know if the order of Sigilites carried on.

In Prospero Burns, we get a lot of conversations between Hawser and other Imperial officials that makes it clear that outside a handful of high officials, (the Emperor and a few select advisers), the IOM does not want to know much about Old Earth and looking into it is not a priority.

 Karhedron wrote:
One of the jobs of the Order of Sigilites is to preserve history. In one of the HH short stories, a group of Malcador's agents retrieve a sealed container from some Chaos worshipers. Opening it, the leader is angry to discover it is just a lump of rock and nearly jettisons it but eventually follows his orders to bring it back to Terra. Malcador then explains that it is the Rosetta stone and explains some of its significance.

So there are people who still are interested in ancient history but they are a small and academic minority with little relevance to day-to-day Imperial Citizens. We know Malcador does not survive the Siege but we don't know if the order of Sigilites carried on.

Mark of Calth seems to show Perpetual Oll Persson telling 30k Imperials about Old Earth, and they were none the wiser about Old Earth before that.


And I meant to say also the 41st millennium Imperium. How much do they know? I doubt they know about World War 1 or anything like that.


And can you show a quote about the Rosetta stone?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

HoundsofDemos wrote:
In Prospero Burns, we get a lot of conversations between Hawser and other Imperial officials that makes it clear that outside a handful of high officials, (the Emperor and a few select advisers), the IOM does not want to know much about Old Earth and looking into it is not a priority.

I would love to read the quote for that. I just want to read it for myself.

Bear in mind how long a span of time 30,000 years is. 30,000 years ago, there were no (modern, at least) humans in America, and it was before the last ice sheets covered Europe. Two or three people actually lived through all the millennia between now and the future, but other than that, having any records is miraculous.

Flight of the Eisenstein implies that Albert Einstein has been confused with Sergei Eisenstein.

It's to long to quote since I'm not going to retype a four to five pages of a novel. The end of the exchanged ends with "answer me this" he said Does anyone even know why the age of strife happened? How did we end up in the great darkness of the Old Night to begin with"

He spends most of the book trying to get the IOM officials to do a hard look back in time and is meet with either outright hostility or patronizing indifference.

Which book is that?

Prospero Burns

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
Bear in mind how long a span of time 30,000 years is. 30,000 years ago, there were no (modern, at least) humans in America, and it was before the last ice sheets covered Europe. Two or three people actually lived through all the millennia between now and the future, but other than that, having any records is miraculous.

Flight of the Eisenstein implies that Albert Einstein has been confused with Sergei Eisenstein.

.


And that's a Horus Heresy book, Flight of the Eisenstain is.


Mark of Calth basically said even the 30k Imperium does not know about Old Earth, as Perpetual Oll Persson was telling people who escaped Calth about his time on Old Earth, and they were none the wiser about Old Earth before that.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
Bear in mind how long a span of time 30,000 years is. 30,000 years ago, there were no (modern, at least) humans in America, and it was before the last ice sheets covered Europe. Two or three people actually lived through all the millennia between now and the future, but other than that, having any records is miraculous.

Flight of the Eisenstein implies that Albert Einstein has been confused with Sergei Eisenstein.

Bear in mind that for most of the last 30k years in real history digital data storage didn't exist. For the next 30k years (following the 40k timeline) it will.

Obviously there are plenty of events that disrupt it, and 30k years is a very long time, but with how easy it is to copy and move information for most of that time it probably doesn't really become an issue until either the Emperor starts messing about with recorded history or the ecclesiarchy starts declaring it heresy.

Onething123456 wrote:
And can you show a quote about the Rosetta stone?

It is in the short story "Sigilite".

I find generally I think of what the Imperium knows about the present day to be similar to what the citizens of Alpha Complex know about history and the world out side.

The Imperium somewhere will have communists worshipping Grocho Marx

given where 40k started out this seems very fitting

Closer to Brazil than 1984

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
Bear in mind how long a span of time 30,000 years is. 30,000 years ago, there were no (modern, at least) humans in America, and it was before the last ice sheets covered Europe. Two or three people actually lived through all the millennia between now and the future, but other than that, having any records is miraculous.

Flight of the Eisenstein implies that Albert Einstein has been confused with Sergei Eisenstein.

I'm not sure why people are expecting there to be loads of info. Even the jump from the HH to present day 40k is longer than our own current recorded history (plus on a galactic scale to boot). There's scant few pieces of info that have been corrupted by years of Chinese whispers such as the example you said and things like "Shakespire" and the toy rocket with CCCP on it.

 Grimtuff wrote:

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
Bear in mind how long a span of time 30,000 years is. 30,000 years ago, there were no (modern, at least) humans in America, and it was before the last ice sheets covered Europe. Two or three people actually lived through all the millennia between now and the future, but other than that, having any records is miraculous.

Flight of the Eisenstein implies that Albert Einstein has been confused with Sergei Eisenstein.

I'm not sure why people are expecting there to be loads of info. Even the jump from the HH to present day 40k is longer than our own current recorded history (plus on a galactic scale to boot). There's scant few pieces of info that have been corrupted by years of Chinese whispers such as the example you said and things like "Shakespire" and the toy rocket with CCCP on it.

Shakespeare didn't share his plays on the cloud though.

 Stux wrote:

 Grimtuff wrote:

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
Bear in mind how long a span of time 30,000 years is. 30,000 years ago, there were no (modern, at least) humans in America, and it was before the last ice sheets covered Europe. Two or three people actually lived through all the millennia between now and the future, but other than that, having any records is miraculous.

Flight of the Eisenstein implies that Albert Einstein has been confused with Sergei Eisenstein.

I'm not sure why people are expecting there to be loads of info. Even the jump from the HH to present day 40k is longer than our own current recorded history (plus on a galactic scale to boot). There's scant few pieces of info that have been corrupted by years of Chinese whispers such as the example you said and things like "Shakespire" and the toy rocket with CCCP on it.

Shakespeare didn't share his plays on the cloud though.

Thank gork he didn't, if he had we would likely have found them inaccessible after about ten years as the DRM server was switched off, or the format they were written in was declared illegal as it may be used to share information the powers that be wish to censor or some other such rubbish.

pen on paper has proven remarkably long lived compared to the very real issue of "bit rot" around digital stuff

leopard wrote:

 Stux wrote:

 Grimtuff wrote:

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
Bear in mind how long a span of time 30,000 years is. 30,000 years ago, there were no (modern, at least) humans in America, and it was before the last ice sheets covered Europe. Two or three people actually lived through all the millennia between now and the future, but other than that, having any records is miraculous.

Flight of the Eisenstein implies that Albert Einstein has been confused with Sergei Eisenstein.

I'm not sure why people are expecting there to be loads of info. Even the jump from the HH to present day 40k is longer than our own current recorded history (plus on a galactic scale to boot). There's scant few pieces of info that have been corrupted by years of Chinese whispers such as the example you said and things like "Shakespire" and the toy rocket with CCCP on it.

Shakespeare didn't share his plays on the cloud though.

Thank gork he didn't, if he had we would likely have found them inaccessible after about ten years as the DRM server was switched off, or the format they were written in was declared illegal as it may be used to share information the powers that be wish to censor or some other such rubbish.

pen on paper has proven remarkably long lived compared to the very real issue of "bit rot" around digital stuff

Ok, but more relevantly, what would it take for all records of basic historic events to be removed from the internet?

Or to completely destroy the internet, assuming that the data is also shared around the galaxy on various planetary and ship based servers?

I'm not saying it couldn't happen, but it's going to take a LOT.

well 1. some sort of global EMP thing, since I doubt most of the servers are hardened against it

or possibly just the indexing systems crashing, which would make finding things a pain.

besides who is to say much of whats known about the world today survived long enough to leave the planet?

Companies only care about what they can sell, and generally want to 'paywall' it so its not accessible, private stuff is generally free but also generally not backed up.

it may be reasonably easy in the future to put the internet in a black box with a red LED on it and give it to some middle management type on a long haul space mission (indeed several of them), but somewhere there will be an accountant asking why you are doing it and where the profit is.

stuff gets written and stuff gets lost all the time, the one sit it was on goes dark and its gone - unless someone else thought it important enough to make a copy of, and not simply link to

stuff on paper survived because to distribute it you needed to actually copy it, on line people just link and forget, then the linsk break and are never fixed.

a server without a backup goes off line, or there is a fire etc.

This is before you have stuff like the unfinished works of the sadly late Sir Terry P, crushed by steam roller as per his wishes and thus lost forever

 Stux wrote:

 Grimtuff wrote:

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
Bear in mind how long a span of time 30,000 years is. 30,000 years ago, there were no (modern, at least) humans in America, and it was before the last ice sheets covered Europe. Two or three people actually lived through all the millennia between now and the future, but other than that, having any records is miraculous.

Flight of the Eisenstein implies that Albert Einstein has been confused with Sergei Eisenstein.

I'm not sure why people are expecting there to be loads of info. Even the jump from the HH to present day 40k is longer than our own current recorded history (plus on a galactic scale to boot). There's scant few pieces of info that have been corrupted by years of Chinese whispers such as the example you said and things like "Shakespire" and the toy rocket with CCCP on it.

Shakespeare didn't share his plays on the cloud though.

Modern (and future) playwrights don't have to deal with the DAOT right now. Think about how much gak we lost in our own history to the dark ages. Now multiply that on a galactic scale and the chances of there being anything truly significant drastic go down.

leopard wrote:
well 1. some sort of global EMP thing, since I doubt most of the servers are hardened against it

or possibly just the indexing systems crashing, which would make finding things a pain.

besides who is to say much of whats known about the world today survived long enough to leave the planet?

Companies only care about what they can sell, and generally want to 'paywall' it so its not accessible, private stuff is generally free but also generally not backed up.

it may be reasonably easy in the future to put the internet in a black box with a red LED on it and give it to some middle management type on a long haul space mission (indeed several of them), but somewhere there will be an accountant asking why you are doing it and where the profit is.

stuff gets written and stuff gets lost all the time, the one sit it was on goes dark and its gone - unless someone else thought it important enough to make a copy of, and not simply link to

stuff on paper survived because to distribute it you needed to actually copy it, on line people just link and forget, then the linsk break and are never fixed.

a server without a backup goes off line, or there is a fire etc.

This is before you have stuff like the unfinished works of the sadly late Sir Terry P, crushed by steam roller as per his wishes and thus lost forever

Once it's off planet, it's much harder for a disaster to remove it. If it survives anywhere, it spreads back everywhere.

If the government privatise the entire internet (big if frankly) people will still setup their own thing separate to it, even if much of the general public aren't aware of it day to day. Dark web or what have you. People will find a way to communicate and share information regardless.

As I said above, once you get to state control on the level of the ecclesiarchy it gets tougher. Where you can be executed immediately and without trial if the state believes you have had access to restricted material. But even then we know there's still a thriving black market in the Imperium.

The main threat I would say is not the information being destroyed as such, but it getting buried by false data. Discerning the truth from fiction might get really difficult, even if all the truth is still there and preserved.

An example of how little they actually know, in the ad mech codex they say the onager dune crawler is based on an vehicle given the acronym MULE which was an “insecticidal” beast of burden that used to walk the ancient Earth. If they think a mule was a giant insect we used to carry loads what they actually “know” might be very inaccurate or completely false. I’m happy to ignore anything the perpetuals say as they are the worst bit of recent fluff.

And on top of that what was known during the great crusade may well be utterly distorted by now. 10000 years is a long time and the imperium isn’t great at record keeping.

another example was a throw away line in a HH book (prosperio burns perhaps) where someone comments that "we've recovered all THREE! of shakespire's plays!"

 Stux wrote:

leopard wrote:
well 1. some sort of global EMP thing, since I doubt most of the servers are hardened against it

or possibly just the indexing systems crashing, which would make finding things a pain.

besides who is to say much of whats known about the world today survived long enough to leave the planet?

Companies only care about what they can sell, and generally want to 'paywall' it so its not accessible, private stuff is generally free but also generally not backed up.

it may be reasonably easy in the future to put the internet in a black box with a red LED on it and give it to some middle management type on a long haul space mission (indeed several of them), but somewhere there will be an accountant asking why you are doing it and where the profit is.

stuff gets written and stuff gets lost all the time, the one sit it was on goes dark and its gone - unless someone else thought it important enough to make a copy of, and not simply link to

stuff on paper survived because to distribute it you needed to actually copy it, on line people just link and forget, then the linsk break and are never fixed.

a server without a backup goes off line, or there is a fire etc.

This is before you have stuff like the unfinished works of the sadly late Sir Terry P, crushed by steam roller as per his wishes and thus lost forever

Once it's off planet, it's much harder for a disaster to remove it. If it survives anywhere, it spreads back everywhere.

If the government privatise the entire internet (big if frankly) people will still setup their own thing separate to it, even if much of the general public aren't aware of it day to day. Dark web or what have you. People will find a way to communicate and share information regardless.

As I said above, once you get to state control on the level of the ecclesiarchy it gets tougher. Where you can be executed immediately and without trial if the state believes you have had access to restricted material. But even then we know there's still a thriving black market in the Imperium.

The main threat I would say is not the information being destroyed as such, but it getting buried by false data. Discerning the truth from fiction might get really difficult, even if all the truth is still there and preserved.

now on sifting truth from deliberate lies and even just separating fact from fiction could well be a serious issue, think the whole premise behind Galaxy Quest

In Dark Imperium Guilliman tries to build a library about the knowledge of the last 10000 years and realizes that a lot has been lost due to imperial dogma.
And that's "just" from 30K to 40K. They barely seem to know about the Beast.
Information about earth in 2K would be very unlikely. Today we only have recovered 2% of the written texts of antiquity, and we are only 2000 years away. And even though real world's christianity did a good job of purging (or simply not copying) everything they didn't like they weren't as bad as 40Ks ecclesiarchy.

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
In Dark Imperium Guilliman tries to build a library about the knowledge of the last 10000 years and realizes that a lot has been lost due to imperial dogma.
And that's "just" from 30K to 40K. They barely seem to know about the Beast.
Information about earth in 2K would be very unlikely. Today we only have recovered 2% of the written texts of antiquity, and we are only 2000 years away. And even though real world's christianity did a good job of purging (or simply not copying) everything they didn't like they weren't as bad as 40Ks ecclesiarchy.

Yeah, I very much agree.

I actually think quite a lot probably survived up until the Heresy. But after that the Ecclesiarchy buried anything that didn't fit their narrative.

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
In Dark Imperium Guilliman tries to build a library about the knowledge of the last 10000 years and realizes that a lot has been lost due to imperial dogma.
And that's "just" from 30K to 40K. They barely seem to know about the Beast.
Information about earth in 2K would be very unlikely. Today we only have recovered 2% of the written texts of antiquity, and we are only 2000 years away. And even though real world's christianity did a good job of purging (or simply not copying) everything they didn't like they weren't as bad as 40Ks ecclesiarchy.

Don't forget ol' Julius Caesar's contribution to that... (maybe)

Andykp wrote:
An example of how little they actually know, in the ad mech codex they say the onager dune crawler is based on an vehicle given the acronym MULE which was an “insecticidal” beast of burden that used to walk the ancient Earth. If they think a mule was a giant insect we used to carry loads what they actually “know” might be very inaccurate or completely false. I’m happy to ignore anything the perpetuals say as they are the worst bit of recent fluff.

And on top of that what was known during the great crusade may well be utterly distorted by now. 10000 years is a long time and the imperium isn’t great at record keeping.

The Perpetuals are part part of the lore whether you like it or not, so we listen to what they say. And they are bad lore just because you say it? That's opinion. Good or bad lore, they are well-written.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Stux wrote:

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
In Dark Imperium Guilliman tries to build a library about the knowledge of the last 10000 years and realizes that a lot has been lost due to imperial dogma.
And that's "just" from 30K to 40K. They barely seem to know about the Beast.
Information about earth in 2K would be very unlikely. Today we only have recovered 2% of the written texts of antiquity, and we are only 2000 years away. And even though real world's christianity did a good job of purging (or simply not copying) everything they didn't like they weren't as bad as 40Ks ecclesiarchy.

Yeah, I very much agree.

I actually think quite a lot probably survived up until the Heresy. But after that the Ecclesiarchy buried anything that didn't fit their narrative.

I have my doubts about that. We can barely keep track of records from 2,000 years ago and have only about two percent of records of all antiquity. Plus the Perpetuals from Old Earth (such as in Mark of Calth)) were teaching people about human history.



The Emperor knows everything about human history. I gave an example from The Last Church in Tales of Heresy.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

HoundsofDemos wrote:
Prospero Burns

I would love to see that quote in a PM since its too long here.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Grimtuff wrote:

 Stux wrote:

 Grimtuff wrote:

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
Bear in mind how long a span of time 30,000 years is. 30,000 years ago, there were no (modern, at least) humans in America, and it was before the last ice sheets covered Europe. Two or three people actually lived through all the millennia between now and the future, but other than that, having any records is miraculous.

Flight of the Eisenstein implies that Albert Einstein has been confused with Sergei Eisenstein.

I'm not sure why people are expecting there to be loads of info. Even the jump from the HH to present day 40k is longer than our own current recorded history (plus on a galactic scale to boot). There's scant few pieces of info that have been corrupted by years of Chinese whispers such as the example you said and things like "Shakespire" and the toy rocket with CCCP on it.

Shakespeare didn't share his plays on the cloud though.

Modern (and future) playwrights don't have to deal with the DAOT right now. Think about how much gak we lost in our own history to the dark ages. Now multiply that on a galactic scale and the chances of there being anything truly significant drastic go down.

You ain't kidding. We lost a lot over the Dark Ages. We lost a lot when places such as the library of Alexandria burned. You can only imagine the Age of Strife. The Emperor is the only one who has complete knowledge on all of human history. And Malcador knows a lot as well. Doesn't the Emperor having a hall of historical and technological devices such as a Mars rover from the 1990s or 2000s?


And medieval Monks had to preserve ancient knowledge by copying them down with their own copies.

BrianDavion wrote:
another example was a throw away line in a HH book (prosperio burns perhaps) where someone comments that "we've recovered all THREE! of shakespire's plays!"

Not bad actually, considering we may have lost a few in less than 500 years.

HoundsofDemos wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:
another example was a throw away line in a HH book (prosperio burns perhaps) where someone comments that "we've recovered all THREE! of shakespire's plays!"

Not bad actually, considering we may have lost a few in less than 500 years.

well in this case, the emphises is on "all three" not "recovered three of" it really hammers in what mankinds lost, not just knowledge, but knowledge OF knowledge.

BrianDavion wrote:

HoundsofDemos wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:
another example was a throw away line in a HH book (prosperio burns perhaps) where someone comments that "we've recovered all THREE! of shakespire's plays!"

Not bad actually, considering we may have lost a few in less than 500 years.

well in this case, the emphises is on "all three" not "recovered three of" it really hammers in what mankinds lost, not just knowledge, but knowledge OF knowledge.

Hmm, I dunno. I take it to mean 'all three of the surviving plays' not that they are certain that only three ever existed.

Onething123456 wrote:



The Perpetuals are part part of the lore whether you like it or not, so we listen to what they say. And they are bad lore just because you say it? That's opinion. Good or bad lore, they are well-written.

What is this special definition you have of "well-written" that makes your posts fact and andykp's opinion?

Besides, just because the Perpetuals lived through all of human history, we don'[t know how well they remember any of it. Most thinsg they do remember - even if they have magical perfect recollection - will only be second-hand at best, because they weren't present at every event. Ollanius Pius (or whatever he's called this week) may well have perfect recollection of what he once read on Wikipedia, but that's certainly not always accurate.