This is the earliest period in the Forerunner history - and in fact, it has been cogently argued that the translation of the Glyphs used to refer to it should be more accurately translated as something like "The Classical Cycle", "Prehistory", or "The Legendary Cycle". All of these possible interpretations have some merit, and it is thus not at all surprising that the information we have about this period is extremely sketchy - even more so than what one would expect, given the fragmentary state of the records we have discovered so far.

The little information we have indicate that it was sometime around the middle of this period that they first developed spaceflight. The date is never given exactly - only as 12/19/6 in their "shorthand" date writing format. Presumably either the exact date was lost in the depths of their past or it was so well known that the full date never needed to be repeated (if we ever discover a History or Reference text aimed at a child, then we may find the answer to this "minor" riddle)

It must be presumed that the period BEFORE the Forerunner adoption of their dating system - before "the acceptance" - was equivalent to the Prehistoric period of Terra. This is, however, by no means certain, as it is quite possible that the Forerunner retroactively assigned their presumably newly designed Calendrical system to a fixed date in the past. This may well explain the lack of detail we have about this period, on the other hand, it may not!

In general, the First Cycle seems to have been equivalent to the period from the discovery of writing (in the Bronze Age), through the rise and fall of various pre-spaceflight civilisations on"Home" (the conjectural translation of Forerunner Glyph for their world of origin) with varying degrees of violence involved, on the unification of the planet just prior to the invention of Spaceflight. Strangely, however, the invention of Starflight capabilities does not seem to have been made during this period. There are mentions of extra-solar colonies, but there seems to be a definite indication of long voyage times being required to travel to them from Home, or to travel between them. The assumption that has been made is that the Forerunners were still using Reaction or TISA powered "Generation Ships" at the end of this period, though this seems strange.

All currently known races have gone from Reaction powered "rockets" to TISA powered craft and on to FTL Drives of various sorts within an absolute time span of only a few hundred years - yet the Forerunners evidently took several THOUSAND years to do so. There are currently no entirely satisfactory explanations of this seeming anomaly, though there seems to be growing acceptance of that put forward by the IRSOL Academician, Norvar Keonaru ( see "The development of Forerunner Technology: Starflight" later in this FM for further discussion) that simply states that the Forerunners did not develop Starflight for the "normal" reasons most race do - curiosity (or its racial analogue) - but for reasons of racial survival. Academician Keonaru has proposed the theory that the Forerunners were originally lured into the Amadathartha psychosis, but, when they had almost exhausted the resources of Home, they were forced to reject this spurious philosophy and adopt Taleel, but no longer possessed the resources on their ruined homeworld to construct the FTL drives that they needed - or even to carry out the required theoretical work that would have culminated in them. This theory certainly fits the facts, but there is much controversy over it at present.