[This article is in reply to a post by Leland Chee (Tasty Taste), asking me to elaborate on how I saw a particular retroactive continuity change (or "retcon"), made by the New Essential Chronology, as creating new discrepancies in Star Wars continuity. His post is located at http://forums.starwars.com/thread.jspa?threadID=152583&start=0645 ]

The date for the origins of the Sith has now had two retcons implemented. In 1996, Tales of the Jedi companion stated, "The Sith have existed for well over a hundred thousand years" and immediately after says "Clearly, the Sith developed second in chrological progression [to the Jedi]". This seemed confirmed in The Sith War when Odan-Urr described a Sith holocron by saying, "Locked within its recesses, accessible only to a Dark Lord of the Sith, are the forgotten histories and lore, dating back a hundred thousand years and more."

However, when compared with information from later sources which have become preferred, the retcon became that the Sith species existed for 100,000 years before the Dark Jedi arrived to dominate them, conveniently ignoring that TOTJC also indicates the Jedi Order was formed even earlier. Since other sources indicate that the Jedi formed after the (re-)invention of the hyperdrive and formation of the Old Republic c. 25,000 BBY, this information needed a retcon to be integrated.

So the retcon was that made stated that the Dark Jedi discovered the Sith following the Great Schism (now called the First Great Schism), which seems to have occurred some time in the first few centuries after the formation of the Jedi Order. This was printed in the Star Wars Encyclopedia (1998), and subsequently used in the chronologies found in WOTC books like Dark Side Sourcebook (2001) and Power of the Jedi Sourcebook (2002). For example, POTJS has under the entry for 25,000 BBY, "During this earliest era, a group of Dark Jedi rose to challenge the Jedi Order. The Dark Jedi were driven from the Republic after a century of battle, eventually resettling on an uncharted world already occupied by a species known as the Sith." DSS similarly has under the 25,000 BBY entry, "Sometime during this ancient period, the first dark side uprising took place." This first uprising has the direct result that "The vanquished Dark Jedi found a primitive civilization called the Sith." So both of these sources identify the First Great Schism, shortly after the foundation of the Republic and Jedi Order, c. 25,000 BBY, to be the same schism that produced the Dark Jedi who found the Sith.

It seemed like this change, from a vague reference of "more than a hundred thousand years" to very specific references to what happened in the 25,000 BBY period, was the retcon that corrected inconsistencies in the continuity. However, now the NEC clearly states that the First Great Schism was a battle between the Jedi and the Legions of Lettow, who are apparently "Dark Jedi" only to the extent that all adepts of the Dark Side have been called "Dark Jedi" in varying sources, whether or not they received Jedi training. The schism of Dark Jedi who discovered the Sith species, by contrast, is placed at 7000 BBY, a period previously associated with a relatively obscure event called "The Hundred-Years Darkness". However, I do not see how the second retcon for this event clarifies inconsistencies instead of making new ones.

This is because some sources refer to events in the Sith Empire between 25,000 BBY and 7000 BBY. The best example I have found is from The Essential Guide to Vehicles and Vessels, which says "Republic Fleet Systems played a large role in Old Republic starship design for over fifteen millennia. The company was founded to design warships to counter the threat of Sith-backed uprisings in distant corners of the Old Republic." Surely this is not the Sith species prior to their discovery by the Dark Jedi exiles, who have been consistently called "primitive" in every source to describe them. If the Sith were causing uprisings on remote Old Republic worlds around 15,000 BBY or earlier, it would have to be after the Dark Jedi founded the Sith Empire.

Another good example comes again from TOTJC, which describes a Sith holocron that "contains the essence of an ancient Sith warlord-king named Adas who had used his knowledge of the dark side to conquer and subjugate his homeworld more than two dozen millennia ago." The primitive Sith species were not mastering the Dark Side or inventing an early holocron technology around 24,000 BBY, and this event has to be after the Dark Jedi became Sith.

These are so far my best examples of events in the Sith Empire prior to 7000 BBY, but there are likely more of them. The sources which place the foundation of the Sith Empire shortly after 25,000 BBY, have been circulating long enough that other SW writers have had the authority to place events happening within the Sith Empire any time after that, and some of them have. By placing the discovery of the Sith at 7000 BBY, it makes those events impossible, which means this retcon creates discrepancies rather than resolving them, and that is the greatest reason why I am trying to understand the purpose of it.

To add to all of this, the change of making the First Great Schism in 25,000 and the Dark Jedi discovering the Sith being a separate event in 7000 BBY appears to directly contradict the original source regarding this event, the Tales of the Jedi comic, The Golden Age of the Sith #0, by Kevin J. Anderson, which says at the very beginning (pp. 2-3):

"The ancient struggle of Light Side and Dark Side, the First Great Schism of the Jedi Knights... The Dark Jedi, finally defeated after a century of bloodshed, took their battered ships into exile... ...crossing the galaxy into the unknown... There the vanquished Dark Jedi found a primitive civilization, a new people to dominate-- The Sith! The Dark Jedi were treated as gods... ...with unlimited resources and willing slaves, the Jedi exiles forged the Sith civilization into a new Empire, bringing about a Golden Age... of evil!" [Please note the ellipses are from the original text, I am not representing portions of skipped text.]

That seems to say rather directly that the First Great Schism is the same schism as the one that produced the Dark Jedi who discovered the Sith.

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

At this point, I'm inclined to think that Dan Wallace has accurately given us an "in-universe" document that was produced by the Historic Council of the Galactic Federation of Free Alliances in 36 ABY, complete with the errors they made. Voren Na'al, Archivist Emeritus of the Historic Council, admits how much their knowledge is lacking due to the censorship of Palpatine's Empire and the destruction of the Yuuzhon Vong invasion. It seems that the new work has conflated two events of remote history, thousands of years earlier, and mistakenly states that the Sith species was discovered following the Hundred-Years Darkness, rather than following the First Great Schism, as other sources have stated. Rather importantly, those other sources are not written as in-universe documents, but instead state their information with an omniscient narrative voice--except of course for the scrolls found by Odan-Urr in Golden Age of the Sith #0, on which all later information was based.

I understand that the Legions of Lettow are not one and the same as the Sith. However, everything I have seen prior to the NEC has indicated that the Sith have a similar relationship with the Lettow as the Jedi have with the Bendu--both in regards to their in-universe histories, and their associations in those very notes of George Lucas from when he was developing the backstory behind Star Wars (before it was even called "A New Hope"), that Mr. Wallace has said were the source of the revised date of 7000 BBY. It has always read as though the Jedi were born out of the Dai Bendu and the Sith were born out of the Legions of Lettow, and that part of the story is similarly disrupted by the notion that the Sith Empire rose 18,000 years after the fall of the Lettow.

I accept that Star Wars has had numerous retcons and will continue to do so, I just hope they can be implemented to resolve problems of continuity rather than create more. I question whether the new date of 7000 BBY instead of 25,000 BBY actually helps resolves problems in Star Wars continuity. At this point it does not appear to resolve anything, but instead this retcon appears to create new discrepancies between the sources. Fortunately, the NEC itself has provided internal information that indicates the work itself may be completely mistaken about ancient events, and I'm inclined to believe that is the case here.