A Brief And Most Likely Inaccurate History of the Alterans
-and of the Goa'uld on Earth, while I'm at it-
Seriously. If there's something in SG-1 canon I missed that contradicts any of my inferences, I'd like to know.
I first fell in love with the movie, so:
-at some point when the Earth is older than it is now-
Human beings, finding themselves crowded (whether confined to one planet or spread out across galaxies, or anywhere in between) decide to solve the problem of no space to live in by going back in time to when there was space, and lots of it.
Of course, every trip in time splits off a new reality; if the changes were drastic enough, cumulative recurrence would most likely not be enough to bring the new reality to a place where it could merge with the old, and instead would create a new reality with new history.
Going-back-in-time-to-when-there-was-room, whether or not the people involved were resolved to try not to interfere with happenings on their original homeworld, was popular enough that more than one set of people did it. Random happenstance being what it is, there are undoubtedly any number of universes where the result of all this was to prevent human beings from ever evolving on the Earth; the Stargate universe, by definition, is not one of them (what with all the humans running around and everything).
One of the sets of people speculating about this going-back-thing live in another galaxy that they have long since spread to. The Ori, as they will later be known, (a) are inveterate meddlers; (b) suffer from the delusion that the rest of the world exists for the purpose of being of use to the Ori; (c) are researching the possibility of becoming energy beings, and have in some cases been successful. Said energy beings, instead of paying attention to the wonders of the universe, found nothing better to do with their time than enforce their fellow Ori's desire for preeminency. Opposing factions block the Ori; one even finds some way to discorporate one of the energy beings.
The Ori promptly decide to go back in time to before their galaxy was full of these inconveniently argumentative people, so that they have time to learn how to all become energy beings, devise safeguards against discorporation -- it looks as if belief confers some sort of incorporating energy, according to early studies -- settle worlds with sympathetic minions before these others can get there, and probably end up by taking over the universe; after all, it's so disorganized, and they'd undoubtedly wind up doing a better job.
Some of "these others," including a fair amount of proto-Ori who don't like the party line for one reason or another, are horrified by this notion. They manage to reverse-engineer or steal enough of the time-travel research to go back themselves, to well before the Ori destination date (which they gained via espionage), although things were tight enough that they wound up leaving around the same time as the Ori, and therefore were unlikely to have blocked them from leaving at all.
-tens of millions of years b.c.e.-
The Others/Alterans take stock. They're free, they have a universe to explore, and while it's likely that the Ori will be turning up one of these eons, they have millennia in which to figure out the secret of ascending to a higher plane for themselves. It would be nice if they also had an Energy Destroyer to improve in those millennia, but somehow none of the people who'd invented the former were near enough to make it through the time-travel mechanism. Oh well. Just in case, they leave the current galaxy for the galaxy where human life began, their scientists already starting to plan how to set up a firewall-slash-Somebody-Else's-Problem field around it that will work against ascended beings, and destroy/forget/lose the data on how to travel in time.
-later-
In the Milky Way Galaxy, the Alterans run into three other sets of time-displaced humans. Evolution and adaptation before and after they left has resulted in many changes from the original -- the Alterans are probably the closest to H. s. sapiens, forming a subspecies rather than a separate species (H. s. alteranus) largely because of the postulated ability to interbreed -- but none of them has changed so much that they cannot recognize their largely shared heritage and their common humanity.
The other races are or will be known as the Nox, the Furlings, and the Asgard (which last were the first set of up-timers, multiversewise, to come back in time and the ones which have done the most spreading out since). The Four Races of Man agree to the Compact, which among other things gives all four races equal rights to hang out on Earth (although the Alterans are the only ones to really colonize it) and shared responsibility for terraforming other planets.
The Nox spend a great deal of time deciding on the most optimal set of plants, animals, and fungi (not to mention required climate) for terraforming planets. None of the other three Races have any real quarrel with the Nox's choice, although they tend to plant Stargates where they hope the Stellar Portals will not be overgrown. As a result, most of the Stargete-bearing planets in the Milky Way and in galaxies the Four Races explored after the Compact tend to look a lot alike, especially when viewed from the Stargate.
The Alterans invent a device that allows someone to go look at another reality, see what would have happened if they'd turned left instead of right, and to share information. Because of concerns about misuse, they build in a failsafe, "entropic cascade failure," to keep people from going to the universe next door and staying there.
-several million years b.c.e.-
A plague is romping up and down the Milky Way Galaxy. Most of the Alterans not actively researching ascension (and a few of the ones that are) pack up their cities and head for the Pegasus Galaxy, where (a) it'll be quieter and (b) they can try that whole "seeding planets with human societies and studying the results" thing without the Nox and the Furlings squawking every five seconds.
-somewhat over a hundred thousand years later-
The emigrants from the Milky Way arrive in the Pegasus Galaxy and park their main city, Atlantis, on a planet with a very nearly Earth-matching revolution around a Sol-type star, whose atmosphere requires minimal tweaking to match Earth's. (They got a slightly longer rotational period and two moons, but one can't have everything.) Other cities were parked elsewhere, and they settled down to start social experimenting on a grand scale.
Most of the Alterans are calling themselves "Asuras" by this point. (Hence their AsuraN weapons.) This isn't particularly relevant at the moment, except for the part where most of them absolutely are the sort of people who'd
-kick over heaven,
-put an oppressive government in power,
-fsck over the people who loved them, and
-cause an untold amount of sentient suffering
because they were completely in love with the idea of one of their own creations.
Meanwhile, in the Milky Way, the Nox start pulling back, hoping eventually to be down to a small population on one world.
-one million years b.c.e.-
Several Alterans have actually managed ascension... somehow... which is just as well, as according to the never-yet-improved last set of calculations it will take ten thousand Ascended Alterans to keep the Ori from wandering into the Milky Way, and time is starting to get a little tight.
One Alteran in the Milky Way galaxy manages to sort of half-Ascend; he got to the energy form part of affairs, but was unable to hold it together until, missing large chunks of himself, he crashed into possessing an Asgard. After a ferocious mental struggle, he absorbed the Asgard, fusing the two of them together. This is eventually going to make a lot of people very unhappy.
In the Pegasus Galaxy, the Alterans are happily periodically making revised Stargates every so often, beta-testing them in parts of the network before upgrading nexi. So far, they've invented the language-bearing Stargate (a frozen form of Alteran descendant that some of the seed descendants started building into use as a lingua franca on their own -- so clever!), the turn-around-and-walk-back-through-it Stargate, and are beginning work on the multiple-destination Stargate (certainly they could always use rings, BUT...)
There's starting to be confusion between Terra, the world down-time where the Alterans lived and left from, and Tellus-Mater, the world up-time where the Alterans first evolved, considering that in many ways they're the same planet. In Gatespeech, Earth is always Tellu-meyter, no matter what.
-a thousand or so years later-
The Alteran-Asgard fusion has been hopping bodies when his old one wears out and absorbing the new consciousness for a while, but it's tiring, it's very noticeable, and people are starting to get suspicious. He decides to try sticking a worm-lamprey symbiont from an undeveloped world into his brain, fuse himself with it, and then pass it on to someone else.
It works like a charm, suppressing its new incubator's personality until the fusion can absorb it at leisure. In at least one case, it suppressed it entirely until the fusion decided to switch.
It also eventuates that when he takes his worm-lamprey self out and breeds it, the changes the energy pattern made in it and the memories impressed therein breed true. The children all want their own intelligent mobile suits to symbiose with, but ridable Asgard are in relatively short supply, and fortunately none of the children inherited the ability to fuse with as well as suppress their hosts. (None of them are at all likely to let Daddy Dearest know that, though.)
-Late Pleistocene Epoch, several thousand years later-
The fusion decides to take a nice vacation while some of his fellow Asgard get a little suspicious over affairs. Visiting Earth and settling in a grassy plain on one of the continents, he discovers that (a) the Alteran healing technology he has around works considerably better on the indigenous humans than on Asgard, particularly given the disturbing trends in recent Asgard physiology, and (b) the symbionts can ride and suppress them even more easily than they can Asgard.
Rîñ (later to be known as Ra) kicks back in his new host, whom he absorbs over the course of the next few centuries, and decides that he's found a Really Good Thing. This is really going to make a lot of people very unhappy. Not as many as the Alterans in the Pegasus Galaxy will manage before they're through, depressingly enough.
In Pegasus, the core Elocutan system rematerializes on the edge of the galaxy. (See below). The Ancients surviving on the two planets and in a research facility on a moon go native, cobble together something resembling a spaceship and go exploring, or put themselves in stasis to wait for rescue as they choose; the moon staff move to one of the planets, as while the moon in question has been terraformed the area around the Gate is not capable of sustaining a settlement in the long run.
-ten thousand years b.c.e.-
In the Pegasus Galaxy, the Wraith attack the Alterans, who really weren't expecting that, despite clear indications. They get pressed back, losing contact with whole sectors. Four of their cities -- Failias, Findias, Gorias, and Murias -- are packed up and sent back via the long timeshifting drives that they used to get to Pegasus in the first place; they will arrive in the vicinity of Earth in another, oh, nine-and-three-quarters thousand years or so. Unfortunately, those are the last ones to make it out before the Wraith could possibly follow their trail.
One of the few weapons that does work against the Wraith (for given values of "work") is the "reciprocal quantum vortex generator," a spherical spacecraft the size of a small planet, which basically uses some of the same technology as the quantum mirrors and as the Stargates themselves to create a field around a distant object and switch the space within the field for an equivalent volume of space somewhere else in space or time or both (much like the effects of an Assiti Shard in Eric Flint's Grantville series). If a destination is not selected, the reciprocal quantum vortex generator will randomly pick one; this is an easier option, as to specify both the target and the destination takes exponentially more power. Its targeting fields are limited in size, but focusing two or more on the same field logarithmically increases the potential vortex area. Unfortunately, many of its uses remove the Wraith from one place only to drop them in an equally bad or even worse place for the Ancients, and the Wraith, while unable to duplicate the technology, come up with a virus for its targeting computers.
After a devastating Wraith-induced malfunction removes not only the Ancient's main robotic research center but the world it was on as well, the Ancients abandon generator production as too costly, phasing them out as the Sentient Asuran Weapons program kicks into high gear. Nanotechnology, robotic weaponry, artificial intelligence, and the design of drone AIs that were essentially psychotic had all been in use for centuries; however, with the loss of the main research center and most of the stockpiled resources with it, they were combined in new and interesting ways to produce the race that would eventually be called the Replicators by the Asgard, the Furies by the Witchfolk, and the Asurans by themselves.
The Asurans are first deployed in the wake of the worst Wraith-related generator disaster yet; the star Eloqui and most of its solar system, including two inhabited planets that were supplying food to the Asuran labs (plural, this time, the Ancients not being entirely incapable of learning from their mistakes), are caught in a vortex created by both malfunctioning and captured generators and lost. The Council sends their killer nanocolonies to destroy, firstly, the captive generators, and secondly, any other reciprocal quantum vortex generators and their working notes, deeming it not only not worth it to keep the outdated ones around but downright dangerous.
In short, worlds are destroyed, there is great bravery and great stupidity that will never be recorded, a few other worlds discover holes they can dive down and pull in after themselves, and a depressingly large percentage of the Alterans who care get killed. Many of the others ascend, and spend a fair amount of time being distracted. Some of the ascended ones help before getting shanghaied into the Anti-Ori wards, but one ascended person still can't do that much, comparatively; at most they can hold back the tide for a little while. Research into Ascension and into rediscovering time travel kicks up.
One of the aforementioned holes for diving down is created by devices changing not only the sun of the planet in question but the stars in the area to put out a form of energy poisonous to Wraith but not overly deadly to non-Ancient humans. (There were still higher incidences of mutations among them for a very long time.) Since Wraith technology is largely organic, especially without the cushioning effect of an atmosphere, they cannot get close enough to the system in question to attack it (although several of the outlying systems got hammered by very large kinetic bolides), especially without knowing precisely which one it is. The creators of this device have already sealed their Stargates off in a desperate attempt to keep the Wraith away, feeling that while they do not know whether it would work they dare not take the risk of letting the Wraith in, even for the sake of letting others know of their possible defensive weapon. Even afterwards, while they feel that their sunlight would strike down even Darts, for millennia they will not risk the possibility of a good old-fashioned bomb.
The new Elocutan location is actually among the sunstrike area; the sunstrikers build their generators on the abandoned moon and steal its Stargate, sneaking in and not wanting even to know of any people who might be there. While some of the colonists on the planet of Eloqui Adsartum, indeed, notice some of the side effects of the spaceship traffic, tensions are high enough (and telescopes minimal enough) that they are assumed to be the doing of some other nation, and indeed become contributory causes to what will be a long and brutal war.
On Earth, Ra has long since borrowed a Stargate from a deceased planet and set it up in the lush valley full of beautiful lakes that he uses as a headquarters. (The Nox haven't visited Earth in millennia, the Asgard visiting Earth mostly keep to areas north and south of the Great Caucasus, the Furlings largely to their old outposts in the Appalachians, and the latter two mostly assume Ra is an Ancient. They're not entirely wrong, despite the kluginess of his bastardized technology. They tend not to notice when his spawn harvest people from other parts of the planet, either.) He starts spreading the word that the grasslands will grow barren and dry and that those who wish to survive had best head for his valley. While he's at it, he sets up his latest crop of spawn to impersonate, among others, the original nine gods of his host's people before he claimed to be a greater god than any of them: there's this legend going around that one of their goddesses defeated him and won his secret name, and it's really very irritating.
-between nine thousand seven hundred and nine thousand five hundred years b.c.e.-
The war on Eloqui Adsartum has been going, in hot and cold spurts, for a long time, partly because all sides involved have been limiting their attacks to those that will not prevent them from taking over and using a conquered area. The three surviving factions have long since built their own killer android -- probably why they are the two surviving factions. One of the factions is building their own miniature reciprocal quantum vortex generator as a doomsday weapon in low-earth geosynchronous orbit; another, as a show of good faith, seals its treaty with the first by putting its most powerful, adapting killer android in stasis. The third musters up its armed forces in secret, launching a coordinated blitzkrieg just before their enemy's doomsday weapon goes online; unfortunately, the makers of the Oculus Excelsus had decided to put in the control interface last, and so are able to kluge a makeshift one in a hurry, key it to their mitochondrial DNA, and turn it on their apparently triumphant enemies.
The results destroy the Adsartunac culture and most of the pure or mostly pure Ancients, although one of the stasis facilities is damaged enough to automatically eject the inhabitants of the surviving pods; the other survivors are too busy trying to survive and rebuild to have any interest in going on with the war, especially since all that vorticificing deposited a lot of very confused humans here and there about the continent. Those humans too near the edge of a given field developed some mild form of psychic abilities; these were not often inheritable, but the most common power to develop was the ability to learn one of the Ancient matter generation/manipulation techniques from an Awakened Ancient. Because the Oculus Excelsus operators tied access to their mitochondrial DNA, their descendants in the female line are also able to use the weapon control station; access to the station itself becomes controlled by the people tending the last remaining bastion of Ancient knowledge in the Mardún facility, which is distant enough from the weapons control station that anything further than locking it up is impractical.
-c. eight thousand seven hundred years b.c.e.-
Having parlayed the ability to use the Oculus Excelsus into political control, the descendants of the Roshtarl operators have occasionally used it as a last resort (and thus find it imperative to keep up good relations with the sacerdotes at Mardún); when they do so this final time, they deposit a number of Wraith hybrids on their world, fortunately of a sort able to photosynthesize. Since the hybrids all came through the same vortex, the ones near the outside all gained the same power -- in this case, the ability to partly resist the debilitating effects of Eloqui's altered sunlight, although they still fled into caves as quickly as they could. The survivors are hated and feared by the humans on the planet, due partly to garbled memories of the Wraith themselves and partly to the fact that, hating the ones who casually brought them here and killed the greater part of them in the process, the Illusion Tribe is not hesitant about striking back as often and devastatingly as they can without risking Pyrrhic victories.
-c. eight thousand four hundred years b.c.e.-
The Alterans, having decided that time travel is still too dangerous to fiddle with, finally abandon the Pegasus Galaxy, sending their people through the Stargate back to Earth. The Antarctic Gate is completely covered in ice, and so they find themselves routed through the facilities on Lanka or the one near Gizeh. Ra, preferring not to fight a horde of Alterans, passes himself off as an Asgard and expedites the matters of getting these people out of the way. A fair number of them decide to celebrate hey-we-made-it by partying down with the locals. Some extensively.
Others, pooling items of technology they brought with them, retrieve one of the ships that brought them to Earth in the first place and build a new, smaller, city around it. Not wanting to clutter up the unexpectedly-populous Nile Valley, they fly their new city to the mouth of the Guadalquivir and park it there; the city is variously known as New Atlantis or as Tartessus.
A fair chunk didn't make it to Atlantis before it went under siege; they try their own version of time travel, based on "quantum mirror" and "reciprocal quantum vortex generator" technology, and wind up not only traveling through time and space but going sideways, hopping across multiple possible realities. On the one hand, they disabled the failsafes in the process, and on the other hand, they landed somewhere/somewhen that it wouldn't have been an issue anyway. They arrive as refugees into a piece of a currently low-tech world inhabited partly by the local equivalent of Pratchett's witches of the Ramtops. This is, quite honestly, the best thing ever to happen to the Alteran race. A side effect of whatever they did made it relatively easy for succeeding ingressions from one side or the other, although by the time the next one into True Witchland occurs there's been a whole lot of interbreeding going on, and the Witchfolk the ingression happens to speak the linguistic descendant of Alteran techs trying to seduce Britt-speaking trader's assistants and Doych barmaids.
Back in the main timeline, during this breather, the principles of Ascension finally become general knowledge among the Alterans, and they start helping each other Ascend. They make ten thousand and then start climbing over it.
One of the Ascending Alterans, Myrddin, grandson of the Moros who was first voice on the Council in Atlantis, manages to ascend past everyone else. While in that rarefied spot, he freely accepts the choice to become one of the kind afterwards spoken of as the Presbyters, or the Powers That Be: who can and must meddle, who see shades of grey, whom the Ascended cannot -- quite -- grasp, who care for everything, and who are utterly without mercy or pity. He goes back down in that instant, and the Alterans think him no more than an eccentric one of them.
-c. eight thousand years b.c.e.-
Four humans are transported to the world once known as Eloqui Adsartum.
The last of the Alterans in Africa finally Ascend or otherwise clear out of Ra's territory. Between the ones who stayed for ages and the ones who spent time with people who have since immigrated into the one slender valley where food reliably grows on an increasingly desert-covered continent, one way or another there are a small but significant amount of Alteran half-breeds in the Two Lands. Ra starts collecting them, choosing them for service offworld and planning to see whether he can interbreed them back to Alteran -- Alteran hosts would probably work out very well, but most of the Alterans know too much to be given to the kids and would probably raise a fit if one turned up missing; hence the Alteran-lite.
-c. seven thousand seven hundred years b.c.e.-
A revolt against Ra arises. Some of the Ascended Alterans who have nothing better to do decide to help chase him offworld. Others think that they are taking too much on themselves, and a nasty squabble ensues that goes on and on with nothing much accomplished.
This is one of the significant cleft points; depending on how many Alterans decided to help out and whether or not one of the Asgard threw in with them, Ra either takes his Alteran breeding program and flees to a mining colony in the Caelian Galaxy, or the revolt gets squashed and he moves all of his breeding programs to various relatively close mining colonies, galactically speaking.
In the first option -- Timeline A -- without him there and with a more substantial Alteran activist presence, the Goa'uld flourish and are later almost entirely destroyed.
One of the Ascended influences matters so that the address buried with the Stargate is not the mining colony's current address, but the address of where it will be when Earth is finally ready to follow up on matters. (They're off in their judgment by a couple thousand years, but fortunately archaeologists are fond of reconstructed star maps. One of the few still-accurate things in E. Wallis Budge, for that matter.)
Some of the Goa'uld were left behind in the hurry, but without access to most of their stolen technology, they are either killed off or forced to uncharacteristic subtlety.
While they're at it, the activists seal off many of the energy bleeds from other planes of existence that have been endemic to Earth since the third round of Alteran Ascension experiments.
In the second option -- Timeline B -- Ra, still in the Milky Way Galaxy, helps arrange for the destruction of several of the seeded planets whose people have started giving his problems. The question of whether anything should be done about the Goa'uld arises, but the Alterans are quick to say it's really the Asgard's fault, and the Asgard say it's the Alterans' problem. (The Asgard also alter their records to wipe out the part where Ra has totally been one of them longer than he'd been Alteran. Most of them never do know.)
-later-
Soulianis, one of the oldest of the September-that-never-ended crop of Ascended Alterans -- she's actually the last child to be born in Atlantis -- decides early on in the squabbling that Ascension really isn't all it's cracked up to be, and Descends onto a nice terraformed planet that was seeded with human life before her people left for Pegasus.
Her husband, Rabban, disapproves of this and tortures her until she re-Ascends. Most of their fellow Alterans see this about the way electroshock therapy used to be regarded: nobody would really want to Descend, so measures used to bring a loved one back to their senses are understandable and forgivable, even if perhaps he took it too far. On the other hand, Rabban is sort of one of the leaders the unattached Ascended don't have, so a lot of them won't bother criticizing him, even as he cheerfully meddles with affairs up and down the galaxy.
Soulianis throws up her metaphorical hands, says some extremely nasty things about would-be-Ori, and Descends onto Earth in the form of a small child without memories -- Rabban will be listening for those, and will have a hard time finding her without them. The question of Rabban gets added to the endless should-we-or-shouldn't-we debate, although his personal charisma tends to overwhelm a lot of people.
-c. seven thousand three hundred years b.c.e.-
Soulianis has grown back up and gotten married and had a happy if somewhat eventful marriage to the best man in the world when Rabban, deciding to take control of the Lankan Stargate, runs across her by pure bad luck and carries her off. (Since torture worked so spectacularly badly last time, he decides to try persuasion and brainwashing.)
Her husband, not unnaturally, objects, and then he gets caught up in an Asgard squabble...
... which is how Rabban eventually gets defeated by an army of Asgard and Furlings, one of his brother Ascended, and a couple of humans (although they may have been a god) wielding a prototype anti-Ori weapon that Soulianis' husband acquired from... somewhere. (He said he got it from a sage who got it from a god. Half the army doesn't believe in gods that they didn't create themselves, but it isn't as if they have a better explanation). This weapon might eventually be worth looking for, but the SGC has this weird habit of not looking in their own backyard so much.
The Ascended Alterans, shocked at what all this had led to -- not least some of the actual conflict -- decide to go Lord Acton one better and leave out the "tends to" part of the statement. They decide that there will be no more interference, save to keep up the ward, and possibly one or two small things, and that abrogation of this will lead to Measures.
Soulianis rolls her eyes and goes home with her husband and brother-in-law. (After setting herself on fire. Long story.) Shortly after they pass through it, volcanic activity on Lanka ruins the Compact facilities there.
In Timeline A, Apophis (stuck on Earth) manages to retrieve the Stargate from it before the entire place turns into Herculaneum, Part One. Unfortunately, he fails to retrieve its address input interface (DHD) with it, making the Stargate an extraordinarily valuable and heavy wall decoration.
In Timeline B, Apophis is out and about in the galaxy. Meres'ger (from Egyptian Meret-seger, Lover of Silence), Daughter of Apophis, tries to, but fails.
In either case, the faction in question begins Project Miscegenation, creating servants of their own blood and memory who will have very good reasons to stay loyal and quiet should contact with off-earth Goa'uld ever be reestablished.
-a few years later-
Athar tries to protect Proculus from the Wraith and gets smacked down for her troubles. One may not agree with Alteran priorities, but there is no denying that they have them.
Soulianis winds up being called into True Witchland when its first king Ascends and taps her as a successor. There's some back-and-forthing before she arrives for good... pregnant... having left her first set of twins with her husband, who has his own kingdom to rule. Death is lighter than a feather; dharma is heavier than a mountain.
For what it's worth, the original king ascended for a reason; Alterans from all sorts of times had wound up arriving in the lands of his birth every so often and mostly getting assimilated, and someone should keep an eye on the results and help out when necessary until his people are ready to stand on their own. Preferably someone who understands just how horrific ascension-for-the-unenlightened actually is.
-c. five thousand years b.c.e.-
The Ori show up in their galaxy and promptly start rearranging matters to suit themselves.
-c. 3200 b.c.e., timeline A-
The Goa'uld try to take over a heavy planet full of patrilineal clans orbiting a red sun. This is a bad move and couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people.
-c. 2995 b.c.e., timeline B-
Another of the periodic rebellions that Ra has been dealing with and erasing all record of ever since the first one actually comes off. This is another cleft point, spawning various realities, such as:
Timeline B.a: the zero point module and note are not discovered before a team of humans goes back in time to put them in place.
Timeline B.b: they are. Nothing otherwise is different from B.a.
Timeline B.c through B.zz: they are. There are minor but significant differences, but they are either adjudged not worth the risk to correct or definite improvements on the world as described in the note left for them.
In any case, one of the chief movers of the rebellion arranges for the carvings by the buried Stargate to give the up-time address of the planet where Ra will be, rather than the down-time address of where it is now. (He could probably input the address in his sleep by this point.)
During the whole affair, the Alterans do shine-all. This is hardly unexpected.
-c. 2800 b.c.e., timeline A-
The Children of Horakhty, as the patrilineal clans under the red sun will be known to the Goa'uld, kick the Mindworms (as the Goa'uld are known to them) off their world and start chasing them down across others. Since they have their Stargate set up as the world's biggest reverse-Roach-Motel, said Hunters in effect accept exile in return for the chance of chasing down the people who have done them untold violence. (Every now and then, matters eventuate such that one of them can come back. Mild telepathy is an evolutionary advantage now and then.) Exposing photosynthetic lifeforms to much more ambient light than they're used to is always shooting at random; in this case, it really, REALLY couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people.
-c. 1700 b.c.e., timeline A-
Apophis, having risen to some prominence in the Near East, largely as a power behind rulers, starts pushing people to go on wandering into Egypt until he can establish an actual power base there; he hopes to get control of Gizeh and unearth the Stargate buried there or at least its address input interface, as the Lankan Stargate is reasonably useless without one. Most of the rulers he's working through are his own descendants and therefore know most of what he knew at the time of their ancestor's engendering; he, meanwhile, is posing as Set, since as annoying as it is not to get proper credit for his deeds he still doesn't want to have to explain matters to the System Lords should it all go pear-shaped. (He is also often addressed as "Ba'al." This means "Lord." Most of the gods in the Middle East have been called "Ba'al" at one time or another. The System Lord known as "Ba'al" appears to be posing as all of them.)
-c. 1700 b.c.e., timeline B-
Meres'ger, having risen to some prominence in the Near East, largely as a power behind rulers, starts pushing people to go on wandering into Egypt until she can establish an actual power base there; she hopes to get control of Gizeh and unearth the Stargate buried there or at least its address input interface, as the Lankan Stargate is reasonably useless without one. Most of the rulers she's working through are her own descendants and therefore know most of what she knew at the time of their ancestor's birth.
Unfortunately, as part of a power struggle in the area, Meres'ger and some of her lineal descendants are beheaded. Goa'uld don't respond to being chopped in half any better than most beings, especially without a sarcophagus. Some of the remaining descendants try for Egypt, Gizeh, and the promise of advanced technology.
-c. 1600 b.c.e., or possibly four hundred and twenty years earlier-
The four cities that left the Pegasus Galaxy back when finally drop out of warp in Earth orbit. One of the Ascended Alterans, possibly Oma Desala, drops by to pass on the new rules. The remaining inhabitants of the cities spend a lot of time arguing over what to do; some of them want to try and park the cities in quiet corners of Earth, some of them want to leave the cities and settle somewhere -- anywhere -- that's on the ground, some of them want to try this Ascension thing, and some of them want to refuel and resupply before heading off to boldly go where no Alteran has gone before. After years of arguing, the people who want to live like humans are dropped off, the people who want to join the small and partly hybrid population in Tartessus do so, some of the cities are parked in very out-of-the-way spots, and at least one takes off for another nearby galaxy.
-c. 1555 b.c.e., timeline A-
Pol-El the Hunter arrives on Earth through the Antarctic Stargate, recently melted free. He dumps a fresh load of ice on it to prevent any more Goa'uld from turning up at his back, and starts searching for someone to do his job on.
-c. 1552 b.c.e., timeline A-
After a lot of digging, Apophis finally discovers the address input interface and manages to hook it up to his Stargate. He takes off to see what Amaunet's been doing without him, and summons Meres'ger from Asia (where she'd been impersonating the local goddess Artemis) to watch the Gate in case someone comes calling and help coordinate the vicious smackdown of Wu`djokheprurîã Ka`moseh and his Egyptians. (Yes, that was his name. It's not as if the Rîñ/Rîã by way of 'Atwama-Rîñ [Atum-Ra] in general Egyptian worship had much of anything left to do with Ra-the-alien.)
Over the next two years, Ka`moseh's people actually come up with a method of "exorcising" a Goa'uld from the human it rides (it leaves the Goa'uld's catatonic body in the human like some sort of biological timebomb, but most of the formerly-ridden hadn't really been expecting more than another threescore years anyway. The longest recorded lifespan of a zombified Goa'uld will later be ninety-three years, which is a good run by any Egyptian standards). This winds up getting used on most of the attempted takeovers, except for a very young queen whose unwilling host kind of feels sorry for her. Meres'ger's former host decides to make herself useful and track down the reports she now remembers of some other alien northwest of the Aegean Sea. She and Pol-El, who's been hanging out with the Dorians in what's now Thessaly and Macedonia, wind up defeating and turning back nomadic raiders who'd been planning to run right through Greece, and incidentally impressing both the raiders and the Dorians no end.
-c. 1549 b.c.e., timeline A-
Three years after the Stargate was unearthed, Ka`moseh is killed, and an alliance of Egyptians, some people speaking an Indo-European language who got swept up in affairs (including the queen's host and the woman hosting Meres'ger's zombie), and Pol-El defeat the returning Apophis and his people and chase most of them back through the Stargate, due in part to a number of them (including the lady called Werit by the Egyptians and Eris [when not Artemis] by the Dorians, Pol-El, the young man who named his indweller "Karen," and Karen herself) half-ascending and forming a Unit, which laid a smackdown on Apophis and all his works, locked Earth's address out of the input interface on the world where it shooed them, and shouted, across worlds and parallel worlds, that memory and genetics need not determine destiny. Granted, a depressingly small fraction of the demi-Harceses both listen and pay attention, but every one that runs away is one they don't have to kill.
Then the Unit discorporates and reincorporates into their separate bodies, several of them very grateful indeed to be no more than human once more, before the Alterans can take Measures. This is still baffling the Alterans: they understand the concept of taking the Ring in order to take a long, dangerous journey while forbearing from using it in order to eventually throw it down a volcano (or not), but they cannot understand why someone would quietly go home, put it on the mantelpiece, and only use it every so often to avoid unwanted callers. They don't get Cincinnatus, either.
The Unit did not precisely intend that several Jaffa trying to stoically endure their way through a plague would be among the personae non gratae, nor that the disease would mutate on the new world to a pneumonic form and to one that targets Goa'uld. In a society full of instantaneous transportation. Most of them, in fact, would have been horrified had they known. From a petty, vindictive point of view, however, it's immensely satisfying.
Karen is found a more willing host, given a lot of useful advice, and tossed through the Stargate to a different planet before it and its interface are quite thoroughly disassembled. She gains influence and eventually spawns children who help her in her anti-System-Lord movement, which spends some time under the working title of "Tok'Ra" before formally agreeing on the name "Harmonious Mutualist Damonic Alliance," or "Damons" for short.
Pol-El returns to his Hunt (making sure to arrange for ice to rebury the Antarctic gate after he goes). The Dorians are left with the impression that their sun and moon gods took human form to save them from raiders and afterwards went to battle a terrible snake at the center of the world. Isn't that in the mountains southwest of home? They've got the snake cult and everything. According to their new tales, the moon goddess is slightly older than her brother the sun god (Werit wasn't, but acted as if she were); he is interested in mathematics and music, while she is a virgin and defends young things with all the fierceness one would expect from the Wild Mother.
The Egyptians, under Ka`moseh's maternal brother, chase the rest of Apophis's (and his puppet king's, named Apopi, Egyptian Yipepi) ruling class to Sharuhen in south Canaan, results of Project Miscegenation peeling off as they go. It will eventually be found that after a certain amount of cross-breeding, the Goa'uld memories will be fuzzy and large chunks will be missing. The children will inherit the memories of their more immediate ancestors instead. Possibly due to these memories, said children are born not subject to Westermarck's Formula; between that, the memories, and the inherent loneliness of having such memories, their lines of descent will be full of all sorts of inbreeding, often containing actual incest. Not all of their descendants will be evil bastards; between the alien DNA and the inbreeding, their families will actually be known for being more physically robust in any given situation than might be expected and for a higher than usual percentage of weird allergies. (A gluten allergy in a preindustrial world, for example, is likely to be extremely miserable.)
For some reason or another, the Asgard are declining here, and will soon stop visiting Earth. Their language will stop being influenced by the changes in language of the Cimmerians they spend time with, and will not eventually develop into something very like Old Norse.
And so everything is pretty much set for Earth in Timeline A to do pretty well on its own for a few thousand years, except maybe for the time the Dorians find the quantum mirror.
-c. 1549 b.c.e., timeline B-
A young Goa'uld queen hears an interdimensional shout and is knocked sideways by a chunk of parallelverse Karen's personality. The resulting queen will eventually take the name Egeria, and some time after that will have a fit of maturity and start a rebellion that will never actually get around to coming up with a name other than "Tok'Ra."
-c. 1450 b.c.e. or thereabouts, timeline B-
A number of Dorians, having tripped through a quantum mirror the Alterans carelessly left in Thessaly, busy themselves with spreading the cult of their twin gods Eris Artemis and Phoebus Apollo before going back through to see if they've found the way home yet. The cult is popular, although eventually Eris Artemis will be identified with the Wild Mother Artemis except for a few traits that will be spun off and turned into "Eris daughter of Night"'s sister Eris, who inspires men to strive for greatness.
-between 1700 and 1287 b.c.e.-
The largest of the islands colonized by Pegasus Alterans is invaded by Goidels. The current inhabitants go underground to escape them.
-between 900 and 753 b.c.e-
Now that Soulianis has blazed the way, various Ascended choose to Descend by ones and twos and groups when it just gets too much for them. They're watched very carefully by the Others, but most are genuine in their desire to return to a life that is pain. Some join communities of their fellow Alterans, others find reasonably empty bits of land and set up on their own. One of these groups descends into a peninsula full of people speaking languages closely related to Alteran.
-around 600 b.c.e.-
The Ancients remaining in Tartessus have dwindled; their language is much contaminated by those of the locals whom they rule over (and whose inscriptions will later be dubbed "Tartessian"), they have garbled the accounts of much of their history, there is internal strife between Descended, Longwayers, and original Tartessians, and people are suggesting that they have lost their original path. Finally, the Dictator at the time flies the city off in the general direction of Kenya.
-sometime after 500 b.c.e.-
An enlightened person comes up with a scheme of the universe in which the Asuras s/he knows of are identified as low-level devas, and the Asurans in the Pegasus Galaxy are mentioned as examples of people whom it would really, really suck to be reborn as. When this cosmology is transmitted through various non-enlightened people, some of the attributions of low-level devas are lost, the Asuran enmity for devas is transferred to yet-lower-level devas, and the final "n" of "Asuran" is lost. Then the theology and the cosmology get more complicated.
-early common era, Timeline A-
Non-Damonic Goa'uld in the Milky Way are wiped out, with the possible exception of a few hiding in backwaters somewhere. The Children of Horakhty have been cheerfully destroying address input interfaces and sometimes Stargates as they went, advising others to bury the Stargates behind them (especially after the plague debacle), in effect destroying the Stargate Network; as a last measure they melt down their own gate and use the naquadah for other things.
The Asgard retreat to their own galaxy, saying something about designing their own anti-Ori wards; the Furlings dropped out of sight a few centuries ago; and the Nox are pleasant enough to visitors, but would really rather not have immigrants. With the Alterans largely ascended and inactive, the Milky Way is left in the hands of the second and third seedings of humanity and of any other aliens that happen to be around, most of whom have no clue what they're doing.
-late in the fourth century c.e.-
Two Alterans apparently Descend into Britain: one, Morgan the elder, by quickening the daughter of British parents, Igerna, who becomes a great and apparently ageless lady among the Damnonii and Votadini; the other, Myrddin, presumably retrieves the time machine he hid for himself and takes off, kiting around the universe working on his special projects. Most of the Alterans think it's a bit much of him -- his own grandfather had pronounced time traveling far too dangerous -- but they did decide no meddling with the corporeal and Myrddin is now undoubtedly corporeal.
-mid-fifth century c.e., Timeline A-
The governance of Britain is eventually left in the hands of two sworn brothers: Emrys, who claims kin to noble Romans and to Igerna's dead son Aurelius Ambrosius, and Uter-Constans, who claims to be a bastard son of the last Emperor out of Britain and the granddaughter of an earlier Emperor and a princess of Arvon. When Uter becomes obsessed with Igerna, now the wife of the military commander of the Horn of Dumnonia and the mother of two daughters and a son, Emrys, apparently having learned nothing from history, borrows a plan to get her husband Gwyrlavis off in battle so he can sneak Uter into Durocornovium and get him laid. He does have enough sense to get Uter to use guile rather than force; however, since Gwyrlavis gets killed in a battle commanded by his cousin Cador, who always does what Emrys tells him to, at a time such that he couldn't have made it back to the Dumnonian fortress in time, Myrddin winds up coming back and begging Igerna to regularize the situation with the father of her son.
Igerna, swearing that Myrddin is going to owe her until the humans build their own starships for this, moves in with Uter, bears his son Artos and daughter Anna so that he can legitimize them, and then slowly poisons the bastard. Artos is fostered out to a descendant of Project Miscegenation living in Arvon who gets taken over by his ancestor when Artos is still young, just as his half-brother was fostered out to Ireland. Igerna, who had brought Witrin, a detachable module from Findias cleverly hidden under a lake in Votadinia, to an island in east Dumnonia, marries the king of Dumnonia; she arranges for nine women with some trace of Alteran blood to tend Witrin, and takes her daughters to stay with relatives in Votadinia.
Ganos Lal, the daughter she bore before her first Ascent, now also known as Morgan the younger, who stuck her head in in time to see the end of this, is extremely and vocally irritated; Morgan the elder, with the aid of the Nine, lays it on Ganos to be bound to the land of Rheged until she bears twins to a human.
After Emrys fakes his death and takes on a new identity as soothsayer Myrddin Emrys (long story. Also incredible gall), his named heir Artos eventually becomes military commander of Britain, smashes the Saxons in twelve battles, comes to Witrin where he is offered Ascension by the original Myrddin (which results in Niamh, one of Igerna's ladies, shoving Myrddin into a stasis unit for a while), marries the brilliant and sneaky Gwenhuvara (who knows as much about civil rule as Artos does about military rule) against Emrys' advice, starts trying to rebuild Rome-in-Britain with the help of his comrades, his sisters (all of whom named at least one son some variation on Guri), and his nephews (one of whom, Medraut, he adopts as his son, Gwenhuvara being barren), and is the catalyst for many actions.
-mid-fifth century c.e., Timeline B-
The governance of Britain is eventually left in the hands of two sworn brothers: Ambrosius Aurelianus, who claims kin to Igerna (who has been persuaded by Myrddin to back it up), and Uter-Constans, who claims to be a bastard son of the last Emperor out of Britain and the daughter of an earlier Emperor and a princess of Arvon. Ambrosius is nearly killed by a Saxon ambush, but Myrddin leans out of an invisible time machine and snatches him away. When Uter becomes obsessed with Igerna, now the wife of the military commander of Dumnonia and the mother of three daughters, Myrddin, armed with the weight of future knowledge, talks her into lying back and thinking of Britain.
Her husband, Gwyrlavis, gets killed in a battle with Uter's forces; Myrddin comes up with a spectacular face-saving lie; and Uter marries Igerna, legitimizing their son Arturus twelve years before Uter is killed in a Saxon ambush. Myrddin fosters Arturus out to a descendant of Project Miscegenation, who gets taken over by his ancestor when Arturus is still young.
Her Ascended daughter, Ganos Lal, also known as Morgan the younger, who stuck her head in in time to see the end of this, is extremely and vocally irritated; Morgan Igerna, with Myrddin's aid, lays it on said daughter to be bound to the land of Rheged until she bears twins to a human. She then takes her youngest and only as-yet-unmarried daughter, retreats to a detachable module from Findias cleverly hidden under a lake in Votadinia, marries her daughter off to the king of that part of Votadinia, and fosters many other girls there before she mysteriously disappears.
When Arturus is old enough, he becomes military commander of Britain; smashes the Saxons in several battles; is offered Ascension by the original Myrddin in Witrin (which results in Covianna, one of Igerna's ladies, taking up her destiny as a Presbyter); and, when making an alliance with Ogrevan the Giant, meets his daughter Gwenhuvara, whom Myrddin has cloned from the most beautiful woman he's ever met and raised to be Arturus's queen. Myrddin had left her there while he evaluated her one last time to see whether she were up to snuff; Arthur marries her anyway, despite Myrddin's qualms.
-sixth century c.e.-
Morgan Ganos finally gets somebody, in fact Urien the local king, to knock her up. As soon as she drops Evan and Morvith off with their father, she starts screeching to any Alterans that will hear her. The Alterans redefine "helping someone else Ascend" as "interfering."
-a little later, Timeline A-
Unfortunately, Medraut grows up to be just like Artos, Gwenhuvara isn't exactly human-normal either and thus does not age the way even half-reshaped-to-be-Alterans do, and after she is kidnapped and Medraut disappears with Artos' foster brother and Bedwyr the Awesomely Put-Together when looking for her, Myrddin shows up to present Artos with Gwenhuvara the Lesser, whom Myrddin has cloned from the most beautiful woman he's ever met and raised to be Artos's queen. The civilian administrators of Britain press Artos into marrying this new Gwenhuvara; when Bedwyr and a suspiciously close Medraut return with the original model, the situation degenerates and a slap on the part of the Lesser precipitates a nasty mess that ends with Medraut and half his relations dead, the Saxons taking a mile when an inch had been neglected, and Artos being clapped into a biostatic healing chamber (sarcophagus) by his mother, his full sister, his mortal half-sister, and Niamh before being taken into Witrin and Myrddin unceremoniously turfed out of his stasis chamber.
Myrddin offers Artos Ascension once more, with the promise that he might Descend upon a world that Myrddin has been establishing, full of the greatest cataphracts of history, all ready and waiting for Artos to be king over them; Artos tells him "pull the other one, it's got bells on," and goes... elsewhere. The Nine hide half of Witrin under the island, which has begun to be called the Isle of Witrin rather than the Mouth of Avalon; they knew from its name that it was supposed to hold a passage to the Underworld (Avalon in British) and deduced the presence of caves. They then fly the other half of Witrin to Armorica, where they sink it under a lake in the Forest of Broceliande; Myrddin remodels Witrin-Avalon for his purposes, that someday when Arthur returns he may be tested within it and find the path at last to the destiny Myrddin makes for him.
-a little later, Timeline B-
Arturus's sister in Votadinia has two sons and a daughter and then disappears herself. One of the sons eventually finds his mother, grandmother, and sister all living in the detachable module, called "Witrin"; they fly it to an island in the marshes of Dumnonia so as to be convenient in case Arturus wants them.
By this time, however, Arturus has gone back in time with Myrddin to pose as Ambrosius, and under that guise beats the Saxons in ten great battles. He returns to his own time, and is killed by Saxons in the battle of Camlann, along with his nephew Medraut and many of his best cataphracts. Fortunately, the Saxons cannot find his body to disfigure it, unlike Medraut's, whose head they carry back to Cerdic.
Arturus's mother, Medraut's mother, and Covianna clap Arturus into a biostatic healing chamber (sarcophagus) and take him to Witrin, where Myrddin is waiting to once more offer him Ascension, with the promise that he might Descend upon a world that Myrddin has been establishing, full of the greatest knights of history and Arturus' foster-brother not least among them, all ready and waiting for Arturus to be king over them. Arturus accepts. Myrddin and Covianna bury half of Witrin under its island, in the caves that the Britons once thought to be the Underworld, and rearrange it for a test to see whether those who pass through it are fit to become Arthur's knights. Covianna flies the other half of Witrin to the bottom of a lake in the Forest of Broceliande in Armorica; Morgan the elder says that she doesn't mind everyone taking her home to pieces without a by-your-leave, really; and Myrddin takes Medraut's mother, Bleisina Morcades, to the world that he will create.
-between 800 and 1000 c.e.-
At least one of the Ancient Cities decides Earth's getting too crowded and takes off after her fellow Alterans.
Myrddin settles on a nicely uninhabited planet, and begins building Camelot, which he names for the tower where he used to live in Atlantis when he was little, on it. Eventually he begins transporting heroes and support staff to it.
In Timeline A, the Children of Horakhty decide to solve their planet's energy problems via a core tap, despite warnings from the chief scientists. When it proves unstable, their orbital habitats are linked up to the boosters meant to power a second wave of their first colonization experiment and sent afterwards, with stasis chambers full of people and no real certainty that they will find a viable world at the end of it. The chief scientist doesn't trust this and has another plan, based on the records that his Returning Hunter ancestor brought back from his Hunt. Meanwhile, Merlin discovers where Artos has gone to -- eventually, a boy, also called Arthur -- and begins work to turn him into the King Arthur Myrddin needs him to be.
-later-
Myrddin installs Arthur as king in Camelot. Morgan Ganos comes up with a plot of her own that skates the thin line of "interference"; she takes on the shape of her and Arthur's mutual sister, Blasine Morgause (Bleisina Morcades), and seduces the brother who does not recognize his sister in this newly youthful form, but is strangely drawn to her. Myrddin, who was never close enough to recognize the seeming Blasine for who she truly was, reunites Arthur with Guenever (Gwenhuvara [the Lesser]), and tries to arrange for the death of Arthur and Morgan's resulting child; instead he causes the death of Blasine's own child by her new husband, Lleu the brother of Urien (the same Urien who fathered Morgan's twins), as well as many other deaths. Morgan Ganos, having foisted her own son off on a bitterly angry Blasine all too willing to believe that the baby is her own child miraculously saved, floats in and out trying to foil Myrddin; Covianna drops by to thwart Ganos; and tales begin to trickle back down to Earth.
-later-
Arthur and his knights leave Camelot. Morgan the younger, after a long time, begins to undergo a conversion.
-1857 c.e.-
The last (before present-day) group of Ascended Alterans choosing mortality Descends into the North of Canada in 1857, adopting nicely inconspicuous surnames such as Knox and Fraser and Gaunt, taking advantage of the frontier habit of not asking questions, and spreading out enough that their children will probably all rather marry each other than anyone else.
-1928 c.e.-
The Langford Expedition digs up the Gizeh Stargate.
-1933 c.e., Timeline B-
A couple of guys in Cleveland have an idea for some backstory they're working on that parallels something that happened in Timeline A. This wouldn't be particularly remarkable, except that over the next hundred or so years events will happen in Timeline A parallelling elements that the Cleveland guys are writing into their story. Given that Ascended beings can at times contact other timelines, the Alterans smell a decided stink of rat, but have yet to find a smoking gun.
-1966 c.e., Timeline B.a-
The Presbyters, with some assistance, seal off almost all of the energy bleeds from other planes of existence that have been endemic to Earth since the third round of Alteran Ascension experiments.
-1972 c.e., Timeline B.a-
Recently-orphaned Gwyneth Lee Sheppard accompanies a number of desperately earnest fellow-Americans to stay at a poorly-run commune in Wales. While there, she meets a quiet boy, old for his age, who dreams dreams he cannot remember on waking and who wants to go out there and change lives. As she will discover when she returns to California, he has most certainly changed hers.
-1993 c.e., Timeline A-
A brilliant young archaeologist with controversial theories, orphaned years ago by a plane crash, is brought to Creek Mountain to translate documents found with the Stargate. He discovers its meaning, invites himself along on the expedition to go see, meets a nice girl, helps her help lead a rebellion, and settles down in a distant galaxy with the beautiful Sha'uri.
Meanwhile, the Earth has had two other wake-up calls that it is not alone in the galaxy. The military calls in the diplomats and signs a very quiet treaty with Nagadat, in which the latter provides Earth with nagadatium and Earth provides Nagadat with anything they want, within reason. They don't want much for several years.
-1996 c.e., Timeline B-
A brilliant young archaeologist with controversial theories, orphaned years ago by an exhibit accident, is brought to Cheyenne Mountain to translate documents found with the Stargate. He discovers its meaning, invites himself along on the expedition to go see, meets a nice girl, helps her help lead a rebellion, and settles down on a not-so-distant planet with the beautiful Sha`re.
Back on Earth, the man who actually led the rebellion conceals the planet's continued existence, for reasons I never quite understood.
-1997 c.e. onwards-
Earth/Tellus becomes a player on the galactic stage. (Half of whose planets are named their language's word for "Earth".)
-2004 c.e.-
Brilliant archaeologist Daniel Jackson, whose ties to the Stargate project remain despite intervening events, shortly before meeting John Sheppard, descendant of Alterans on both sides, discovers and identifies the address of the Atlantian Stargate.
ETA: Fixed a hysteron-proteron error.
Seriously. If there's something in SG-1 canon I missed that contradicts any of my inferences, I'd like to know.
I first fell in love with the movie, so:
-at some point when the Earth is older than it is now-
Human beings, finding themselves crowded (whether confined to one planet or spread out across galaxies, or anywhere in between) decide to solve the problem of no space to live in by going back in time to when there was space, and lots of it.
Of course, every trip in time splits off a new reality; if the changes were drastic enough, cumulative recurrence would most likely not be enough to bring the new reality to a place where it could merge with the old, and instead would create a new reality with new history.
Going-back-in-time-to-when-there-was-room, whether or not the people involved were resolved to try not to interfere with happenings on their original homeworld, was popular enough that more than one set of people did it. Random happenstance being what it is, there are undoubtedly any number of universes where the result of all this was to prevent human beings from ever evolving on the Earth; the Stargate universe, by definition, is not one of them (what with all the humans running around and everything).
One of the sets of people speculating about this going-back-thing live in another galaxy that they have long since spread to. The Ori, as they will later be known, (a) are inveterate meddlers; (b) suffer from the delusion that the rest of the world exists for the purpose of being of use to the Ori; (c) are researching the possibility of becoming energy beings, and have in some cases been successful. Said energy beings, instead of paying attention to the wonders of the universe, found nothing better to do with their time than enforce their fellow Ori's desire for preeminency. Opposing factions block the Ori; one even finds some way to discorporate one of the energy beings.
The Ori promptly decide to go back in time to before their galaxy was full of these inconveniently argumentative people, so that they have time to learn how to all become energy beings, devise safeguards against discorporation -- it looks as if belief confers some sort of incorporating energy, according to early studies -- settle worlds with sympathetic minions before these others can get there, and probably end up by taking over the universe; after all, it's so disorganized, and they'd undoubtedly wind up doing a better job.
Some of "these others," including a fair amount of proto-Ori who don't like the party line for one reason or another, are horrified by this notion. They manage to reverse-engineer or steal enough of the time-travel research to go back themselves, to well before the Ori destination date (which they gained via espionage), although things were tight enough that they wound up leaving around the same time as the Ori, and therefore were unlikely to have blocked them from leaving at all.
-tens of millions of years b.c.e.-
The Others/Alterans take stock. They're free, they have a universe to explore, and while it's likely that the Ori will be turning up one of these eons, they have millennia in which to figure out the secret of ascending to a higher plane for themselves. It would be nice if they also had an Energy Destroyer to improve in those millennia, but somehow none of the people who'd invented the former were near enough to make it through the time-travel mechanism. Oh well. Just in case, they leave the current galaxy for the galaxy where human life began, their scientists already starting to plan how to set up a firewall-slash-Somebody-Else's-Problem field around it that will work against ascended beings, and destroy/forget/lose the data on how to travel in time.
-later-
In the Milky Way Galaxy, the Alterans run into three other sets of time-displaced humans. Evolution and adaptation before and after they left has resulted in many changes from the original -- the Alterans are probably the closest to H. s. sapiens, forming a subspecies rather than a separate species (H. s. alteranus) largely because of the postulated ability to interbreed -- but none of them has changed so much that they cannot recognize their largely shared heritage and their common humanity.
The other races are or will be known as the Nox, the Furlings, and the Asgard (which last were the first set of up-timers, multiversewise, to come back in time and the ones which have done the most spreading out since). The Four Races of Man agree to the Compact, which among other things gives all four races equal rights to hang out on Earth (although the Alterans are the only ones to really colonize it) and shared responsibility for terraforming other planets.
The Nox spend a great deal of time deciding on the most optimal set of plants, animals, and fungi (not to mention required climate) for terraforming planets. None of the other three Races have any real quarrel with the Nox's choice, although they tend to plant Stargates where they hope the Stellar Portals will not be overgrown. As a result, most of the Stargete-bearing planets in the Milky Way and in galaxies the Four Races explored after the Compact tend to look a lot alike, especially when viewed from the Stargate.
The Alterans invent a device that allows someone to go look at another reality, see what would have happened if they'd turned left instead of right, and to share information. Because of concerns about misuse, they build in a failsafe, "entropic cascade failure," to keep people from going to the universe next door and staying there.
-several million years b.c.e.-
A plague is romping up and down the Milky Way Galaxy. Most of the Alterans not actively researching ascension (and a few of the ones that are) pack up their cities and head for the Pegasus Galaxy, where (a) it'll be quieter and (b) they can try that whole "seeding planets with human societies and studying the results" thing without the Nox and the Furlings squawking every five seconds.
-somewhat over a hundred thousand years later-
The emigrants from the Milky Way arrive in the Pegasus Galaxy and park their main city, Atlantis, on a planet with a very nearly Earth-matching revolution around a Sol-type star, whose atmosphere requires minimal tweaking to match Earth's. (They got a slightly longer rotational period and two moons, but one can't have everything.) Other cities were parked elsewhere, and they settled down to start social experimenting on a grand scale.
Most of the Alterans are calling themselves "Asuras" by this point. (Hence their AsuraN weapons.) This isn't particularly relevant at the moment, except for the part where most of them absolutely are the sort of people who'd
-kick over heaven,
-put an oppressive government in power,
-fsck over the people who loved them, and
-cause an untold amount of sentient suffering
because they were completely in love with the idea of one of their own creations.
Meanwhile, in the Milky Way, the Nox start pulling back, hoping eventually to be down to a small population on one world.
-one million years b.c.e.-
Several Alterans have actually managed ascension... somehow... which is just as well, as according to the never-yet-improved last set of calculations it will take ten thousand Ascended Alterans to keep the Ori from wandering into the Milky Way, and time is starting to get a little tight.
One Alteran in the Milky Way galaxy manages to sort of half-Ascend; he got to the energy form part of affairs, but was unable to hold it together until, missing large chunks of himself, he crashed into possessing an Asgard. After a ferocious mental struggle, he absorbed the Asgard, fusing the two of them together. This is eventually going to make a lot of people very unhappy.
In the Pegasus Galaxy, the Alterans are happily periodically making revised Stargates every so often, beta-testing them in parts of the network before upgrading nexi. So far, they've invented the language-bearing Stargate (a frozen form of Alteran descendant that some of the seed descendants started building into use as a lingua franca on their own -- so clever!), the turn-around-and-walk-back-through-it Stargate, and are beginning work on the multiple-destination Stargate (certainly they could always use rings, BUT...)
There's starting to be confusion between Terra, the world down-time where the Alterans lived and left from, and Tellus-Mater, the world up-time where the Alterans first evolved, considering that in many ways they're the same planet. In Gatespeech, Earth is always Tellu-meyter, no matter what.
-a thousand or so years later-
The Alteran-Asgard fusion has been hopping bodies when his old one wears out and absorbing the new consciousness for a while, but it's tiring, it's very noticeable, and people are starting to get suspicious. He decides to try sticking a worm-lamprey symbiont from an undeveloped world into his brain, fuse himself with it, and then pass it on to someone else.
It works like a charm, suppressing its new incubator's personality until the fusion can absorb it at leisure. In at least one case, it suppressed it entirely until the fusion decided to switch.
It also eventuates that when he takes his worm-lamprey self out and breeds it, the changes the energy pattern made in it and the memories impressed therein breed true. The children all want their own intelligent mobile suits to symbiose with, but ridable Asgard are in relatively short supply, and fortunately none of the children inherited the ability to fuse with as well as suppress their hosts. (None of them are at all likely to let Daddy Dearest know that, though.)
-Late Pleistocene Epoch, several thousand years later-
The fusion decides to take a nice vacation while some of his fellow Asgard get a little suspicious over affairs. Visiting Earth and settling in a grassy plain on one of the continents, he discovers that (a) the Alteran healing technology he has around works considerably better on the indigenous humans than on Asgard, particularly given the disturbing trends in recent Asgard physiology, and (b) the symbionts can ride and suppress them even more easily than they can Asgard.
Rîñ (later to be known as Ra) kicks back in his new host, whom he absorbs over the course of the next few centuries, and decides that he's found a Really Good Thing. This is really going to make a lot of people very unhappy. Not as many as the Alterans in the Pegasus Galaxy will manage before they're through, depressingly enough.
In Pegasus, the core Elocutan system rematerializes on the edge of the galaxy. (See below). The Ancients surviving on the two planets and in a research facility on a moon go native, cobble together something resembling a spaceship and go exploring, or put themselves in stasis to wait for rescue as they choose; the moon staff move to one of the planets, as while the moon in question has been terraformed the area around the Gate is not capable of sustaining a settlement in the long run.
-ten thousand years b.c.e.-
In the Pegasus Galaxy, the Wraith attack the Alterans, who really weren't expecting that, despite clear indications. They get pressed back, losing contact with whole sectors. Four of their cities -- Failias, Findias, Gorias, and Murias -- are packed up and sent back via the long timeshifting drives that they used to get to Pegasus in the first place; they will arrive in the vicinity of Earth in another, oh, nine-and-three-quarters thousand years or so. Unfortunately, those are the last ones to make it out before the Wraith could possibly follow their trail.
One of the few weapons that does work against the Wraith (for given values of "work") is the "reciprocal quantum vortex generator," a spherical spacecraft the size of a small planet, which basically uses some of the same technology as the quantum mirrors and as the Stargates themselves to create a field around a distant object and switch the space within the field for an equivalent volume of space somewhere else in space or time or both (much like the effects of an Assiti Shard in Eric Flint's Grantville series). If a destination is not selected, the reciprocal quantum vortex generator will randomly pick one; this is an easier option, as to specify both the target and the destination takes exponentially more power. Its targeting fields are limited in size, but focusing two or more on the same field logarithmically increases the potential vortex area. Unfortunately, many of its uses remove the Wraith from one place only to drop them in an equally bad or even worse place for the Ancients, and the Wraith, while unable to duplicate the technology, come up with a virus for its targeting computers.
After a devastating Wraith-induced malfunction removes not only the Ancient's main robotic research center but the world it was on as well, the Ancients abandon generator production as too costly, phasing them out as the Sentient Asuran Weapons program kicks into high gear. Nanotechnology, robotic weaponry, artificial intelligence, and the design of drone AIs that were essentially psychotic had all been in use for centuries; however, with the loss of the main research center and most of the stockpiled resources with it, they were combined in new and interesting ways to produce the race that would eventually be called the Replicators by the Asgard, the Furies by the Witchfolk, and the Asurans by themselves.
The Asurans are first deployed in the wake of the worst Wraith-related generator disaster yet; the star Eloqui and most of its solar system, including two inhabited planets that were supplying food to the Asuran labs (plural, this time, the Ancients not being entirely incapable of learning from their mistakes), are caught in a vortex created by both malfunctioning and captured generators and lost. The Council sends their killer nanocolonies to destroy, firstly, the captive generators, and secondly, any other reciprocal quantum vortex generators and their working notes, deeming it not only not worth it to keep the outdated ones around but downright dangerous.
In short, worlds are destroyed, there is great bravery and great stupidity that will never be recorded, a few other worlds discover holes they can dive down and pull in after themselves, and a depressingly large percentage of the Alterans who care get killed. Many of the others ascend, and spend a fair amount of time being distracted. Some of the ascended ones help before getting shanghaied into the Anti-Ori wards, but one ascended person still can't do that much, comparatively; at most they can hold back the tide for a little while. Research into Ascension and into rediscovering time travel kicks up.
One of the aforementioned holes for diving down is created by devices changing not only the sun of the planet in question but the stars in the area to put out a form of energy poisonous to Wraith but not overly deadly to non-Ancient humans. (There were still higher incidences of mutations among them for a very long time.) Since Wraith technology is largely organic, especially without the cushioning effect of an atmosphere, they cannot get close enough to the system in question to attack it (although several of the outlying systems got hammered by very large kinetic bolides), especially without knowing precisely which one it is. The creators of this device have already sealed their Stargates off in a desperate attempt to keep the Wraith away, feeling that while they do not know whether it would work they dare not take the risk of letting the Wraith in, even for the sake of letting others know of their possible defensive weapon. Even afterwards, while they feel that their sunlight would strike down even Darts, for millennia they will not risk the possibility of a good old-fashioned bomb.
The new Elocutan location is actually among the sunstrike area; the sunstrikers build their generators on the abandoned moon and steal its Stargate, sneaking in and not wanting even to know of any people who might be there. While some of the colonists on the planet of Eloqui Adsartum, indeed, notice some of the side effects of the spaceship traffic, tensions are high enough (and telescopes minimal enough) that they are assumed to be the doing of some other nation, and indeed become contributory causes to what will be a long and brutal war.
On Earth, Ra has long since borrowed a Stargate from a deceased planet and set it up in the lush valley full of beautiful lakes that he uses as a headquarters. (The Nox haven't visited Earth in millennia, the Asgard visiting Earth mostly keep to areas north and south of the Great Caucasus, the Furlings largely to their old outposts in the Appalachians, and the latter two mostly assume Ra is an Ancient. They're not entirely wrong, despite the kluginess of his bastardized technology. They tend not to notice when his spawn harvest people from other parts of the planet, either.) He starts spreading the word that the grasslands will grow barren and dry and that those who wish to survive had best head for his valley. While he's at it, he sets up his latest crop of spawn to impersonate, among others, the original nine gods of his host's people before he claimed to be a greater god than any of them: there's this legend going around that one of their goddesses defeated him and won his secret name, and it's really very irritating.
-between nine thousand seven hundred and nine thousand five hundred years b.c.e.-
The war on Eloqui Adsartum has been going, in hot and cold spurts, for a long time, partly because all sides involved have been limiting their attacks to those that will not prevent them from taking over and using a conquered area. The three surviving factions have long since built their own killer android -- probably why they are the two surviving factions. One of the factions is building their own miniature reciprocal quantum vortex generator as a doomsday weapon in low-earth geosynchronous orbit; another, as a show of good faith, seals its treaty with the first by putting its most powerful, adapting killer android in stasis. The third musters up its armed forces in secret, launching a coordinated blitzkrieg just before their enemy's doomsday weapon goes online; unfortunately, the makers of the Oculus Excelsus had decided to put in the control interface last, and so are able to kluge a makeshift one in a hurry, key it to their mitochondrial DNA, and turn it on their apparently triumphant enemies.
The results destroy the Adsartunac culture and most of the pure or mostly pure Ancients, although one of the stasis facilities is damaged enough to automatically eject the inhabitants of the surviving pods; the other survivors are too busy trying to survive and rebuild to have any interest in going on with the war, especially since all that vorticificing deposited a lot of very confused humans here and there about the continent. Those humans too near the edge of a given field developed some mild form of psychic abilities; these were not often inheritable, but the most common power to develop was the ability to learn one of the Ancient matter generation/manipulation techniques from an Awakened Ancient. Because the Oculus Excelsus operators tied access to their mitochondrial DNA, their descendants in the female line are also able to use the weapon control station; access to the station itself becomes controlled by the people tending the last remaining bastion of Ancient knowledge in the Mardún facility, which is distant enough from the weapons control station that anything further than locking it up is impractical.
-c. eight thousand seven hundred years b.c.e.-
Having parlayed the ability to use the Oculus Excelsus into political control, the descendants of the Roshtarl operators have occasionally used it as a last resort (and thus find it imperative to keep up good relations with the sacerdotes at Mardún); when they do so this final time, they deposit a number of Wraith hybrids on their world, fortunately of a sort able to photosynthesize. Since the hybrids all came through the same vortex, the ones near the outside all gained the same power -- in this case, the ability to partly resist the debilitating effects of Eloqui's altered sunlight, although they still fled into caves as quickly as they could. The survivors are hated and feared by the humans on the planet, due partly to garbled memories of the Wraith themselves and partly to the fact that, hating the ones who casually brought them here and killed the greater part of them in the process, the Illusion Tribe is not hesitant about striking back as often and devastatingly as they can without risking Pyrrhic victories.
-c. eight thousand four hundred years b.c.e.-
The Alterans, having decided that time travel is still too dangerous to fiddle with, finally abandon the Pegasus Galaxy, sending their people through the Stargate back to Earth. The Antarctic Gate is completely covered in ice, and so they find themselves routed through the facilities on Lanka or the one near Gizeh. Ra, preferring not to fight a horde of Alterans, passes himself off as an Asgard and expedites the matters of getting these people out of the way. A fair number of them decide to celebrate hey-we-made-it by partying down with the locals. Some extensively.
Others, pooling items of technology they brought with them, retrieve one of the ships that brought them to Earth in the first place and build a new, smaller, city around it. Not wanting to clutter up the unexpectedly-populous Nile Valley, they fly their new city to the mouth of the Guadalquivir and park it there; the city is variously known as New Atlantis or as Tartessus.
A fair chunk didn't make it to Atlantis before it went under siege; they try their own version of time travel, based on "quantum mirror" and "reciprocal quantum vortex generator" technology, and wind up not only traveling through time and space but going sideways, hopping across multiple possible realities. On the one hand, they disabled the failsafes in the process, and on the other hand, they landed somewhere/somewhen that it wouldn't have been an issue anyway. They arrive as refugees into a piece of a currently low-tech world inhabited partly by the local equivalent of Pratchett's witches of the Ramtops. This is, quite honestly, the best thing ever to happen to the Alteran race. A side effect of whatever they did made it relatively easy for succeeding ingressions from one side or the other, although by the time the next one into True Witchland occurs there's been a whole lot of interbreeding going on, and the Witchfolk the ingression happens to speak the linguistic descendant of Alteran techs trying to seduce Britt-speaking trader's assistants and Doych barmaids.
Back in the main timeline, during this breather, the principles of Ascension finally become general knowledge among the Alterans, and they start helping each other Ascend. They make ten thousand and then start climbing over it.
One of the Ascending Alterans, Myrddin, grandson of the Moros who was first voice on the Council in Atlantis, manages to ascend past everyone else. While in that rarefied spot, he freely accepts the choice to become one of the kind afterwards spoken of as the Presbyters, or the Powers That Be: who can and must meddle, who see shades of grey, whom the Ascended cannot -- quite -- grasp, who care for everything, and who are utterly without mercy or pity. He goes back down in that instant, and the Alterans think him no more than an eccentric one of them.
-c. eight thousand years b.c.e.-
Four humans are transported to the world once known as Eloqui Adsartum.
The last of the Alterans in Africa finally Ascend or otherwise clear out of Ra's territory. Between the ones who stayed for ages and the ones who spent time with people who have since immigrated into the one slender valley where food reliably grows on an increasingly desert-covered continent, one way or another there are a small but significant amount of Alteran half-breeds in the Two Lands. Ra starts collecting them, choosing them for service offworld and planning to see whether he can interbreed them back to Alteran -- Alteran hosts would probably work out very well, but most of the Alterans know too much to be given to the kids and would probably raise a fit if one turned up missing; hence the Alteran-lite.
-c. seven thousand seven hundred years b.c.e.-
A revolt against Ra arises. Some of the Ascended Alterans who have nothing better to do decide to help chase him offworld. Others think that they are taking too much on themselves, and a nasty squabble ensues that goes on and on with nothing much accomplished.
This is one of the significant cleft points; depending on how many Alterans decided to help out and whether or not one of the Asgard threw in with them, Ra either takes his Alteran breeding program and flees to a mining colony in the Caelian Galaxy, or the revolt gets squashed and he moves all of his breeding programs to various relatively close mining colonies, galactically speaking.
In the first option -- Timeline A -- without him there and with a more substantial Alteran activist presence, the Goa'uld flourish and are later almost entirely destroyed.
One of the Ascended influences matters so that the address buried with the Stargate is not the mining colony's current address, but the address of where it will be when Earth is finally ready to follow up on matters. (They're off in their judgment by a couple thousand years, but fortunately archaeologists are fond of reconstructed star maps. One of the few still-accurate things in E. Wallis Budge, for that matter.)
Some of the Goa'uld were left behind in the hurry, but without access to most of their stolen technology, they are either killed off or forced to uncharacteristic subtlety.
While they're at it, the activists seal off many of the energy bleeds from other planes of existence that have been endemic to Earth since the third round of Alteran Ascension experiments.
In the second option -- Timeline B -- Ra, still in the Milky Way Galaxy, helps arrange for the destruction of several of the seeded planets whose people have started giving his problems. The question of whether anything should be done about the Goa'uld arises, but the Alterans are quick to say it's really the Asgard's fault, and the Asgard say it's the Alterans' problem. (The Asgard also alter their records to wipe out the part where Ra has totally been one of them longer than he'd been Alteran. Most of them never do know.)
-later-
Soulianis, one of the oldest of the September-that-never-ended crop of Ascended Alterans -- she's actually the last child to be born in Atlantis -- decides early on in the squabbling that Ascension really isn't all it's cracked up to be, and Descends onto a nice terraformed planet that was seeded with human life before her people left for Pegasus.
Her husband, Rabban, disapproves of this and tortures her until she re-Ascends. Most of their fellow Alterans see this about the way electroshock therapy used to be regarded: nobody would really want to Descend, so measures used to bring a loved one back to their senses are understandable and forgivable, even if perhaps he took it too far. On the other hand, Rabban is sort of one of the leaders the unattached Ascended don't have, so a lot of them won't bother criticizing him, even as he cheerfully meddles with affairs up and down the galaxy.
Soulianis throws up her metaphorical hands, says some extremely nasty things about would-be-Ori, and Descends onto Earth in the form of a small child without memories -- Rabban will be listening for those, and will have a hard time finding her without them. The question of Rabban gets added to the endless should-we-or-shouldn't-we debate, although his personal charisma tends to overwhelm a lot of people.
-c. seven thousand three hundred years b.c.e.-
Soulianis has grown back up and gotten married and had a happy if somewhat eventful marriage to the best man in the world when Rabban, deciding to take control of the Lankan Stargate, runs across her by pure bad luck and carries her off. (Since torture worked so spectacularly badly last time, he decides to try persuasion and brainwashing.)
Her husband, not unnaturally, objects, and then he gets caught up in an Asgard squabble...
... which is how Rabban eventually gets defeated by an army of Asgard and Furlings, one of his brother Ascended, and a couple of humans (although they may have been a god) wielding a prototype anti-Ori weapon that Soulianis' husband acquired from... somewhere. (He said he got it from a sage who got it from a god. Half the army doesn't believe in gods that they didn't create themselves, but it isn't as if they have a better explanation). This weapon might eventually be worth looking for, but the SGC has this weird habit of not looking in their own backyard so much.
The Ascended Alterans, shocked at what all this had led to -- not least some of the actual conflict -- decide to go Lord Acton one better and leave out the "tends to" part of the statement. They decide that there will be no more interference, save to keep up the ward, and possibly one or two small things, and that abrogation of this will lead to Measures.
Soulianis rolls her eyes and goes home with her husband and brother-in-law. (After setting herself on fire. Long story.) Shortly after they pass through it, volcanic activity on Lanka ruins the Compact facilities there.
In Timeline A, Apophis (stuck on Earth) manages to retrieve the Stargate from it before the entire place turns into Herculaneum, Part One. Unfortunately, he fails to retrieve its address input interface (DHD) with it, making the Stargate an extraordinarily valuable and heavy wall decoration.
In Timeline B, Apophis is out and about in the galaxy. Meres'ger (from Egyptian Meret-seger, Lover of Silence), Daughter of Apophis, tries to, but fails.
In either case, the faction in question begins Project Miscegenation, creating servants of their own blood and memory who will have very good reasons to stay loyal and quiet should contact with off-earth Goa'uld ever be reestablished.
-a few years later-
Athar tries to protect Proculus from the Wraith and gets smacked down for her troubles. One may not agree with Alteran priorities, but there is no denying that they have them.
Soulianis winds up being called into True Witchland when its first king Ascends and taps her as a successor. There's some back-and-forthing before she arrives for good... pregnant... having left her first set of twins with her husband, who has his own kingdom to rule. Death is lighter than a feather; dharma is heavier than a mountain.
For what it's worth, the original king ascended for a reason; Alterans from all sorts of times had wound up arriving in the lands of his birth every so often and mostly getting assimilated, and someone should keep an eye on the results and help out when necessary until his people are ready to stand on their own. Preferably someone who understands just how horrific ascension-for-the-unenlightened actually is.
-c. five thousand years b.c.e.-
The Ori show up in their galaxy and promptly start rearranging matters to suit themselves.
-c. 3200 b.c.e., timeline A-
The Goa'uld try to take over a heavy planet full of patrilineal clans orbiting a red sun. This is a bad move and couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people.
-c. 2995 b.c.e., timeline B-
Another of the periodic rebellions that Ra has been dealing with and erasing all record of ever since the first one actually comes off. This is another cleft point, spawning various realities, such as:
Timeline B.a: the zero point module and note are not discovered before a team of humans goes back in time to put them in place.
Timeline B.b: they are. Nothing otherwise is different from B.a.
Timeline B.c through B.zz: they are. There are minor but significant differences, but they are either adjudged not worth the risk to correct or definite improvements on the world as described in the note left for them.
In any case, one of the chief movers of the rebellion arranges for the carvings by the buried Stargate to give the up-time address of the planet where Ra will be, rather than the down-time address of where it is now. (He could probably input the address in his sleep by this point.)
During the whole affair, the Alterans do shine-all. This is hardly unexpected.
-c. 2800 b.c.e., timeline A-
The Children of Horakhty, as the patrilineal clans under the red sun will be known to the Goa'uld, kick the Mindworms (as the Goa'uld are known to them) off their world and start chasing them down across others. Since they have their Stargate set up as the world's biggest reverse-Roach-Motel, said Hunters in effect accept exile in return for the chance of chasing down the people who have done them untold violence. (Every now and then, matters eventuate such that one of them can come back. Mild telepathy is an evolutionary advantage now and then.) Exposing photosynthetic lifeforms to much more ambient light than they're used to is always shooting at random; in this case, it really, REALLY couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people.
-c. 1700 b.c.e., timeline A-
Apophis, having risen to some prominence in the Near East, largely as a power behind rulers, starts pushing people to go on wandering into Egypt until he can establish an actual power base there; he hopes to get control of Gizeh and unearth the Stargate buried there or at least its address input interface, as the Lankan Stargate is reasonably useless without one. Most of the rulers he's working through are his own descendants and therefore know most of what he knew at the time of their ancestor's engendering; he, meanwhile, is posing as Set, since as annoying as it is not to get proper credit for his deeds he still doesn't want to have to explain matters to the System Lords should it all go pear-shaped. (He is also often addressed as "Ba'al." This means "Lord." Most of the gods in the Middle East have been called "Ba'al" at one time or another. The System Lord known as "Ba'al" appears to be posing as all of them.)
-c. 1700 b.c.e., timeline B-
Meres'ger, having risen to some prominence in the Near East, largely as a power behind rulers, starts pushing people to go on wandering into Egypt until she can establish an actual power base there; she hopes to get control of Gizeh and unearth the Stargate buried there or at least its address input interface, as the Lankan Stargate is reasonably useless without one. Most of the rulers she's working through are her own descendants and therefore know most of what she knew at the time of their ancestor's birth.
Unfortunately, as part of a power struggle in the area, Meres'ger and some of her lineal descendants are beheaded. Goa'uld don't respond to being chopped in half any better than most beings, especially without a sarcophagus. Some of the remaining descendants try for Egypt, Gizeh, and the promise of advanced technology.
-c. 1600 b.c.e., or possibly four hundred and twenty years earlier-
The four cities that left the Pegasus Galaxy back when finally drop out of warp in Earth orbit. One of the Ascended Alterans, possibly Oma Desala, drops by to pass on the new rules. The remaining inhabitants of the cities spend a lot of time arguing over what to do; some of them want to try and park the cities in quiet corners of Earth, some of them want to leave the cities and settle somewhere -- anywhere -- that's on the ground, some of them want to try this Ascension thing, and some of them want to refuel and resupply before heading off to boldly go where no Alteran has gone before. After years of arguing, the people who want to live like humans are dropped off, the people who want to join the small and partly hybrid population in Tartessus do so, some of the cities are parked in very out-of-the-way spots, and at least one takes off for another nearby galaxy.
-c. 1555 b.c.e., timeline A-
Pol-El the Hunter arrives on Earth through the Antarctic Stargate, recently melted free. He dumps a fresh load of ice on it to prevent any more Goa'uld from turning up at his back, and starts searching for someone to do his job on.
-c. 1552 b.c.e., timeline A-
After a lot of digging, Apophis finally discovers the address input interface and manages to hook it up to his Stargate. He takes off to see what Amaunet's been doing without him, and summons Meres'ger from Asia (where she'd been impersonating the local goddess Artemis) to watch the Gate in case someone comes calling and help coordinate the vicious smackdown of Wu`djokheprurîã Ka`moseh and his Egyptians. (Yes, that was his name. It's not as if the Rîñ/Rîã by way of 'Atwama-Rîñ [Atum-Ra] in general Egyptian worship had much of anything left to do with Ra-the-alien.)
Over the next two years, Ka`moseh's people actually come up with a method of "exorcising" a Goa'uld from the human it rides (it leaves the Goa'uld's catatonic body in the human like some sort of biological timebomb, but most of the formerly-ridden hadn't really been expecting more than another threescore years anyway. The longest recorded lifespan of a zombified Goa'uld will later be ninety-three years, which is a good run by any Egyptian standards). This winds up getting used on most of the attempted takeovers, except for a very young queen whose unwilling host kind of feels sorry for her. Meres'ger's former host decides to make herself useful and track down the reports she now remembers of some other alien northwest of the Aegean Sea. She and Pol-El, who's been hanging out with the Dorians in what's now Thessaly and Macedonia, wind up defeating and turning back nomadic raiders who'd been planning to run right through Greece, and incidentally impressing both the raiders and the Dorians no end.
-c. 1549 b.c.e., timeline A-
Three years after the Stargate was unearthed, Ka`moseh is killed, and an alliance of Egyptians, some people speaking an Indo-European language who got swept up in affairs (including the queen's host and the woman hosting Meres'ger's zombie), and Pol-El defeat the returning Apophis and his people and chase most of them back through the Stargate, due in part to a number of them (including the lady called Werit by the Egyptians and Eris [when not Artemis] by the Dorians, Pol-El, the young man who named his indweller "Karen," and Karen herself) half-ascending and forming a Unit, which laid a smackdown on Apophis and all his works, locked Earth's address out of the input interface on the world where it shooed them, and shouted, across worlds and parallel worlds, that memory and genetics need not determine destiny. Granted, a depressingly small fraction of the demi-Harceses both listen and pay attention, but every one that runs away is one they don't have to kill.
Then the Unit discorporates and reincorporates into their separate bodies, several of them very grateful indeed to be no more than human once more, before the Alterans can take Measures. This is still baffling the Alterans: they understand the concept of taking the Ring in order to take a long, dangerous journey while forbearing from using it in order to eventually throw it down a volcano (or not), but they cannot understand why someone would quietly go home, put it on the mantelpiece, and only use it every so often to avoid unwanted callers. They don't get Cincinnatus, either.
The Unit did not precisely intend that several Jaffa trying to stoically endure their way through a plague would be among the personae non gratae, nor that the disease would mutate on the new world to a pneumonic form and to one that targets Goa'uld. In a society full of instantaneous transportation. Most of them, in fact, would have been horrified had they known. From a petty, vindictive point of view, however, it's immensely satisfying.
Karen is found a more willing host, given a lot of useful advice, and tossed through the Stargate to a different planet before it and its interface are quite thoroughly disassembled. She gains influence and eventually spawns children who help her in her anti-System-Lord movement, which spends some time under the working title of "Tok'Ra" before formally agreeing on the name "Harmonious Mutualist Damonic Alliance," or "Damons" for short.
Pol-El returns to his Hunt (making sure to arrange for ice to rebury the Antarctic gate after he goes). The Dorians are left with the impression that their sun and moon gods took human form to save them from raiders and afterwards went to battle a terrible snake at the center of the world. Isn't that in the mountains southwest of home? They've got the snake cult and everything. According to their new tales, the moon goddess is slightly older than her brother the sun god (Werit wasn't, but acted as if she were); he is interested in mathematics and music, while she is a virgin and defends young things with all the fierceness one would expect from the Wild Mother.
The Egyptians, under Ka`moseh's maternal brother, chase the rest of Apophis's (and his puppet king's, named Apopi, Egyptian Yipepi) ruling class to Sharuhen in south Canaan, results of Project Miscegenation peeling off as they go. It will eventually be found that after a certain amount of cross-breeding, the Goa'uld memories will be fuzzy and large chunks will be missing. The children will inherit the memories of their more immediate ancestors instead. Possibly due to these memories, said children are born not subject to Westermarck's Formula; between that, the memories, and the inherent loneliness of having such memories, their lines of descent will be full of all sorts of inbreeding, often containing actual incest. Not all of their descendants will be evil bastards; between the alien DNA and the inbreeding, their families will actually be known for being more physically robust in any given situation than might be expected and for a higher than usual percentage of weird allergies. (A gluten allergy in a preindustrial world, for example, is likely to be extremely miserable.)
For some reason or another, the Asgard are declining here, and will soon stop visiting Earth. Their language will stop being influenced by the changes in language of the Cimmerians they spend time with, and will not eventually develop into something very like Old Norse.
And so everything is pretty much set for Earth in Timeline A to do pretty well on its own for a few thousand years, except maybe for the time the Dorians find the quantum mirror.
-c. 1549 b.c.e., timeline B-
A young Goa'uld queen hears an interdimensional shout and is knocked sideways by a chunk of parallelverse Karen's personality. The resulting queen will eventually take the name Egeria, and some time after that will have a fit of maturity and start a rebellion that will never actually get around to coming up with a name other than "Tok'Ra."
-c. 1450 b.c.e. or thereabouts, timeline B-
A number of Dorians, having tripped through a quantum mirror the Alterans carelessly left in Thessaly, busy themselves with spreading the cult of their twin gods Eris Artemis and Phoebus Apollo before going back through to see if they've found the way home yet. The cult is popular, although eventually Eris Artemis will be identified with the Wild Mother Artemis except for a few traits that will be spun off and turned into "Eris daughter of Night"'s sister Eris, who inspires men to strive for greatness.
-between 1700 and 1287 b.c.e.-
The largest of the islands colonized by Pegasus Alterans is invaded by Goidels. The current inhabitants go underground to escape them.
-between 900 and 753 b.c.e-
Now that Soulianis has blazed the way, various Ascended choose to Descend by ones and twos and groups when it just gets too much for them. They're watched very carefully by the Others, but most are genuine in their desire to return to a life that is pain. Some join communities of their fellow Alterans, others find reasonably empty bits of land and set up on their own. One of these groups descends into a peninsula full of people speaking languages closely related to Alteran.
-around 600 b.c.e.-
The Ancients remaining in Tartessus have dwindled; their language is much contaminated by those of the locals whom they rule over (and whose inscriptions will later be dubbed "Tartessian"), they have garbled the accounts of much of their history, there is internal strife between Descended, Longwayers, and original Tartessians, and people are suggesting that they have lost their original path. Finally, the Dictator at the time flies the city off in the general direction of Kenya.
-sometime after 500 b.c.e.-
An enlightened person comes up with a scheme of the universe in which the Asuras s/he knows of are identified as low-level devas, and the Asurans in the Pegasus Galaxy are mentioned as examples of people whom it would really, really suck to be reborn as. When this cosmology is transmitted through various non-enlightened people, some of the attributions of low-level devas are lost, the Asuran enmity for devas is transferred to yet-lower-level devas, and the final "n" of "Asuran" is lost. Then the theology and the cosmology get more complicated.
-early common era, Timeline A-
Non-Damonic Goa'uld in the Milky Way are wiped out, with the possible exception of a few hiding in backwaters somewhere. The Children of Horakhty have been cheerfully destroying address input interfaces and sometimes Stargates as they went, advising others to bury the Stargates behind them (especially after the plague debacle), in effect destroying the Stargate Network; as a last measure they melt down their own gate and use the naquadah for other things.
The Asgard retreat to their own galaxy, saying something about designing their own anti-Ori wards; the Furlings dropped out of sight a few centuries ago; and the Nox are pleasant enough to visitors, but would really rather not have immigrants. With the Alterans largely ascended and inactive, the Milky Way is left in the hands of the second and third seedings of humanity and of any other aliens that happen to be around, most of whom have no clue what they're doing.
-late in the fourth century c.e.-
Two Alterans apparently Descend into Britain: one, Morgan the elder, by quickening the daughter of British parents, Igerna, who becomes a great and apparently ageless lady among the Damnonii and Votadini; the other, Myrddin, presumably retrieves the time machine he hid for himself and takes off, kiting around the universe working on his special projects. Most of the Alterans think it's a bit much of him -- his own grandfather had pronounced time traveling far too dangerous -- but they did decide no meddling with the corporeal and Myrddin is now undoubtedly corporeal.
-mid-fifth century c.e., Timeline A-
The governance of Britain is eventually left in the hands of two sworn brothers: Emrys, who claims kin to noble Romans and to Igerna's dead son Aurelius Ambrosius, and Uter-Constans, who claims to be a bastard son of the last Emperor out of Britain and the granddaughter of an earlier Emperor and a princess of Arvon. When Uter becomes obsessed with Igerna, now the wife of the military commander of the Horn of Dumnonia and the mother of two daughters and a son, Emrys, apparently having learned nothing from history, borrows a plan to get her husband Gwyrlavis off in battle so he can sneak Uter into Durocornovium and get him laid. He does have enough sense to get Uter to use guile rather than force; however, since Gwyrlavis gets killed in a battle commanded by his cousin Cador, who always does what Emrys tells him to, at a time such that he couldn't have made it back to the Dumnonian fortress in time, Myrddin winds up coming back and begging Igerna to regularize the situation with the father of her son.
Igerna, swearing that Myrddin is going to owe her until the humans build their own starships for this, moves in with Uter, bears his son Artos and daughter Anna so that he can legitimize them, and then slowly poisons the bastard. Artos is fostered out to a descendant of Project Miscegenation living in Arvon who gets taken over by his ancestor when Artos is still young, just as his half-brother was fostered out to Ireland. Igerna, who had brought Witrin, a detachable module from Findias cleverly hidden under a lake in Votadinia, to an island in east Dumnonia, marries the king of Dumnonia; she arranges for nine women with some trace of Alteran blood to tend Witrin, and takes her daughters to stay with relatives in Votadinia.
Ganos Lal, the daughter she bore before her first Ascent, now also known as Morgan the younger, who stuck her head in in time to see the end of this, is extremely and vocally irritated; Morgan the elder, with the aid of the Nine, lays it on Ganos to be bound to the land of Rheged until she bears twins to a human.
After Emrys fakes his death and takes on a new identity as soothsayer Myrddin Emrys (long story. Also incredible gall), his named heir Artos eventually becomes military commander of Britain, smashes the Saxons in twelve battles, comes to Witrin where he is offered Ascension by the original Myrddin (which results in Niamh, one of Igerna's ladies, shoving Myrddin into a stasis unit for a while), marries the brilliant and sneaky Gwenhuvara (who knows as much about civil rule as Artos does about military rule) against Emrys' advice, starts trying to rebuild Rome-in-Britain with the help of his comrades, his sisters (all of whom named at least one son some variation on Guri), and his nephews (one of whom, Medraut, he adopts as his son, Gwenhuvara being barren), and is the catalyst for many actions.
-mid-fifth century c.e., Timeline B-
The governance of Britain is eventually left in the hands of two sworn brothers: Ambrosius Aurelianus, who claims kin to Igerna (who has been persuaded by Myrddin to back it up), and Uter-Constans, who claims to be a bastard son of the last Emperor out of Britain and the daughter of an earlier Emperor and a princess of Arvon. Ambrosius is nearly killed by a Saxon ambush, but Myrddin leans out of an invisible time machine and snatches him away. When Uter becomes obsessed with Igerna, now the wife of the military commander of Dumnonia and the mother of three daughters, Myrddin, armed with the weight of future knowledge, talks her into lying back and thinking of Britain.
Her husband, Gwyrlavis, gets killed in a battle with Uter's forces; Myrddin comes up with a spectacular face-saving lie; and Uter marries Igerna, legitimizing their son Arturus twelve years before Uter is killed in a Saxon ambush. Myrddin fosters Arturus out to a descendant of Project Miscegenation, who gets taken over by his ancestor when Arturus is still young.
Her Ascended daughter, Ganos Lal, also known as Morgan the younger, who stuck her head in in time to see the end of this, is extremely and vocally irritated; Morgan Igerna, with Myrddin's aid, lays it on said daughter to be bound to the land of Rheged until she bears twins to a human. She then takes her youngest and only as-yet-unmarried daughter, retreats to a detachable module from Findias cleverly hidden under a lake in Votadinia, marries her daughter off to the king of that part of Votadinia, and fosters many other girls there before she mysteriously disappears.
When Arturus is old enough, he becomes military commander of Britain; smashes the Saxons in several battles; is offered Ascension by the original Myrddin in Witrin (which results in Covianna, one of Igerna's ladies, taking up her destiny as a Presbyter); and, when making an alliance with Ogrevan the Giant, meets his daughter Gwenhuvara, whom Myrddin has cloned from the most beautiful woman he's ever met and raised to be Arturus's queen. Myrddin had left her there while he evaluated her one last time to see whether she were up to snuff; Arthur marries her anyway, despite Myrddin's qualms.
-sixth century c.e.-
Morgan Ganos finally gets somebody, in fact Urien the local king, to knock her up. As soon as she drops Evan and Morvith off with their father, she starts screeching to any Alterans that will hear her. The Alterans redefine "helping someone else Ascend" as "interfering."
-a little later, Timeline A-
Unfortunately, Medraut grows up to be just like Artos, Gwenhuvara isn't exactly human-normal either and thus does not age the way even half-reshaped-to-be-Alterans do, and after she is kidnapped and Medraut disappears with Artos' foster brother and Bedwyr the Awesomely Put-Together when looking for her, Myrddin shows up to present Artos with Gwenhuvara the Lesser, whom Myrddin has cloned from the most beautiful woman he's ever met and raised to be Artos's queen. The civilian administrators of Britain press Artos into marrying this new Gwenhuvara; when Bedwyr and a suspiciously close Medraut return with the original model, the situation degenerates and a slap on the part of the Lesser precipitates a nasty mess that ends with Medraut and half his relations dead, the Saxons taking a mile when an inch had been neglected, and Artos being clapped into a biostatic healing chamber (sarcophagus) by his mother, his full sister, his mortal half-sister, and Niamh before being taken into Witrin and Myrddin unceremoniously turfed out of his stasis chamber.
Myrddin offers Artos Ascension once more, with the promise that he might Descend upon a world that Myrddin has been establishing, full of the greatest cataphracts of history, all ready and waiting for Artos to be king over them; Artos tells him "pull the other one, it's got bells on," and goes... elsewhere. The Nine hide half of Witrin under the island, which has begun to be called the Isle of Witrin rather than the Mouth of Avalon; they knew from its name that it was supposed to hold a passage to the Underworld (Avalon in British) and deduced the presence of caves. They then fly the other half of Witrin to Armorica, where they sink it under a lake in the Forest of Broceliande; Myrddin remodels Witrin-Avalon for his purposes, that someday when Arthur returns he may be tested within it and find the path at last to the destiny Myrddin makes for him.
-a little later, Timeline B-
Arturus's sister in Votadinia has two sons and a daughter and then disappears herself. One of the sons eventually finds his mother, grandmother, and sister all living in the detachable module, called "Witrin"; they fly it to an island in the marshes of Dumnonia so as to be convenient in case Arturus wants them.
By this time, however, Arturus has gone back in time with Myrddin to pose as Ambrosius, and under that guise beats the Saxons in ten great battles. He returns to his own time, and is killed by Saxons in the battle of Camlann, along with his nephew Medraut and many of his best cataphracts. Fortunately, the Saxons cannot find his body to disfigure it, unlike Medraut's, whose head they carry back to Cerdic.
Arturus's mother, Medraut's mother, and Covianna clap Arturus into a biostatic healing chamber (sarcophagus) and take him to Witrin, where Myrddin is waiting to once more offer him Ascension, with the promise that he might Descend upon a world that Myrddin has been establishing, full of the greatest knights of history and Arturus' foster-brother not least among them, all ready and waiting for Arturus to be king over them. Arturus accepts. Myrddin and Covianna bury half of Witrin under its island, in the caves that the Britons once thought to be the Underworld, and rearrange it for a test to see whether those who pass through it are fit to become Arthur's knights. Covianna flies the other half of Witrin to the bottom of a lake in the Forest of Broceliande in Armorica; Morgan the elder says that she doesn't mind everyone taking her home to pieces without a by-your-leave, really; and Myrddin takes Medraut's mother, Bleisina Morcades, to the world that he will create.
-between 800 and 1000 c.e.-
At least one of the Ancient Cities decides Earth's getting too crowded and takes off after her fellow Alterans.
Myrddin settles on a nicely uninhabited planet, and begins building Camelot, which he names for the tower where he used to live in Atlantis when he was little, on it. Eventually he begins transporting heroes and support staff to it.
In Timeline A, the Children of Horakhty decide to solve their planet's energy problems via a core tap, despite warnings from the chief scientists. When it proves unstable, their orbital habitats are linked up to the boosters meant to power a second wave of their first colonization experiment and sent afterwards, with stasis chambers full of people and no real certainty that they will find a viable world at the end of it. The chief scientist doesn't trust this and has another plan, based on the records that his Returning Hunter ancestor brought back from his Hunt. Meanwhile, Merlin discovers where Artos has gone to -- eventually, a boy, also called Arthur -- and begins work to turn him into the King Arthur Myrddin needs him to be.
-later-
Myrddin installs Arthur as king in Camelot. Morgan Ganos comes up with a plot of her own that skates the thin line of "interference"; she takes on the shape of her and Arthur's mutual sister, Blasine Morgause (Bleisina Morcades), and seduces the brother who does not recognize his sister in this newly youthful form, but is strangely drawn to her. Myrddin, who was never close enough to recognize the seeming Blasine for who she truly was, reunites Arthur with Guenever (Gwenhuvara [the Lesser]), and tries to arrange for the death of Arthur and Morgan's resulting child; instead he causes the death of Blasine's own child by her new husband, Lleu the brother of Urien (the same Urien who fathered Morgan's twins), as well as many other deaths. Morgan Ganos, having foisted her own son off on a bitterly angry Blasine all too willing to believe that the baby is her own child miraculously saved, floats in and out trying to foil Myrddin; Covianna drops by to thwart Ganos; and tales begin to trickle back down to Earth.
-later-
Arthur and his knights leave Camelot. Morgan the younger, after a long time, begins to undergo a conversion.
-1857 c.e.-
The last (before present-day) group of Ascended Alterans choosing mortality Descends into the North of Canada in 1857, adopting nicely inconspicuous surnames such as Knox and Fraser and Gaunt, taking advantage of the frontier habit of not asking questions, and spreading out enough that their children will probably all rather marry each other than anyone else.
-1928 c.e.-
The Langford Expedition digs up the Gizeh Stargate.
-1933 c.e., Timeline B-
A couple of guys in Cleveland have an idea for some backstory they're working on that parallels something that happened in Timeline A. This wouldn't be particularly remarkable, except that over the next hundred or so years events will happen in Timeline A parallelling elements that the Cleveland guys are writing into their story. Given that Ascended beings can at times contact other timelines, the Alterans smell a decided stink of rat, but have yet to find a smoking gun.
-1966 c.e., Timeline B.a-
The Presbyters, with some assistance, seal off almost all of the energy bleeds from other planes of existence that have been endemic to Earth since the third round of Alteran Ascension experiments.
-1972 c.e., Timeline B.a-
Recently-orphaned Gwyneth Lee Sheppard accompanies a number of desperately earnest fellow-Americans to stay at a poorly-run commune in Wales. While there, she meets a quiet boy, old for his age, who dreams dreams he cannot remember on waking and who wants to go out there and change lives. As she will discover when she returns to California, he has most certainly changed hers.
-1993 c.e., Timeline A-
A brilliant young archaeologist with controversial theories, orphaned years ago by a plane crash, is brought to Creek Mountain to translate documents found with the Stargate. He discovers its meaning, invites himself along on the expedition to go see, meets a nice girl, helps her help lead a rebellion, and settles down in a distant galaxy with the beautiful Sha'uri.
Meanwhile, the Earth has had two other wake-up calls that it is not alone in the galaxy. The military calls in the diplomats and signs a very quiet treaty with Nagadat, in which the latter provides Earth with nagadatium and Earth provides Nagadat with anything they want, within reason. They don't want much for several years.
-1996 c.e., Timeline B-
A brilliant young archaeologist with controversial theories, orphaned years ago by an exhibit accident, is brought to Cheyenne Mountain to translate documents found with the Stargate. He discovers its meaning, invites himself along on the expedition to go see, meets a nice girl, helps her help lead a rebellion, and settles down on a not-so-distant planet with the beautiful Sha`re.
Back on Earth, the man who actually led the rebellion conceals the planet's continued existence, for reasons I never quite understood.
-1997 c.e. onwards-
Earth/Tellus becomes a player on the galactic stage. (Half of whose planets are named their language's word for "Earth".)
-2004 c.e.-
Brilliant archaeologist Daniel Jackson, whose ties to the Stargate project remain despite intervening events, shortly before meeting John Sheppard, descendant of Alterans on both sides, discovers and identifies the address of the Atlantian Stargate.
ETA: Fixed a hysteron-proteron error.