Ages

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

An age entry records a specific, named span within a tradition's own scheme of cosmic or world time, a Golden Age, a yuga, a named sun or era, considered for what that tradition says characterizes the age and how the age relates to the ages before and after it, distinct from a historical period in describing a tradition's own cosmology rather than a documented span of political history. Hesiod's Cosmos situates the poet's own five metal ages, gold, silver, bronze, heroic and iron, within the wider Greek project of using a sequence of ages to explain why the present age falls short of an imagined earlier one.

An entry records an age's stated position in its tradition's own sequence, what qualities or conditions that tradition attributes to it, and how the tradition says one age ends and the next begins, a moral decline, a catastrophe, a renewal, since these transition accounts vary considerably between traditions even where the underlying pattern of decline and renewal looks similar.

An age entry treats each tradition's own scheme on its own terms rather than mapping every age onto a single universal timeline, since Hesiod's own five ages and a wholly different tradition's ages are two separate documented cosmologies, not two versions of one shared count.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Luis Gonzalez-Reimann's study of the Mahabharata and the yugas traces how the epic itself develops the four age Hindu scheme, Krita, Treta, Dvapara and Kali, each shorter and more morally diminished than the one before it, showing the scheme was elaborated and refined within the text's own long documented composition rather than arriving fully formed.

That documented development matters for an age entry because it means a tradition's own cosmic age scheme can itself have a real textual history, earlier and later strata of the same epic describing the yugas somewhat differently, and an entry records that internal variation rather than presenting a single, harmonized version as though the tradition had always stated it identically.

An age entry on a yuga therefore records its stated place in the four age cycle, its relative length and moral character as the tradition describes them, and, where scholarship has traced it, how the account itself developed across the tradition's own textual history, since Gonzalez-Reimann's own account treats that textual history as inseparable from the yuga scheme itself. The present age, Kali Yuga, is described by the same documented standard as the three that preceded it.