The REAL LORE Behind the MEN OF GOLD, STONE and IRON | Warhammer 40,000 Retrospective

hi gang long ago in the dim and distant prehistory of Warhammer 40K there were the men of gold and the men of stone the distant ancestors of mankind by whose efforts the Galaxy was populated and conquered and whose artifice brought about the age of technology and the sentient robots known as the men of iron and whose civilization collapsed when they inevitably turned so who were these Golden Stone men of 41st Millennium myth it's the sort of question that generates an awful lot of fan theories so in this video I'm going to go back and look at what is actually [Music] written so the story of the men of gold men of stone and Men of iron is one of those persistent bits of Warhammer that just pops up from time to time the very simplified version of The Story Goes that long ago way past the point of human recordkeeping at least in the 41st Millennium there was a race of humanity known to the people of 40K as the men of gold who were amazing the Pinnacle of humanity and at some point in our future and 40K distant past the golden men sent out into the void men of stone who were constructed or engineered or or just really good at technology and in turn they made the men of iron who we know as artificial intelligences sentient robots and then those men of iron went on to Rebel plunging the Galaxy into war and leading to Humanity's distrust of new technology and the outlawing of AI and all of that stuff helped plunge mankind into the age of strife which lasted ,000 years until the coming of the emperor that's the basic story we'll look at it in detail later the men of iron are mentioned a lot in 40K they pop up occasionally as an ancient antagonist from the past but the men of gold and stone are an inworld mystery ancient history never fully explained just hinted at from various sources and in Warhammer that sort of thing leads to content you can find a million theories and videos and explainers of the different material men and what it all really means and as usual with labe the facts and the fan theories are often modeled together to create something that sounds a bit more solid than it actually is and to allow the Creator to Waffle on for an hour and that can be confusing there are actual mentions of this theory in published 40K works and they're all from a very specific period in time so in this video we're going to go back to the original Source material read through every single bit of lore about the men of stone and gold don't worry that won't take long look at how that developed into the men of iron who have a little bit more information and then look at how modern 40K makes use of this ancient law if it really even does so let's start way back at the beginning with the very first mention of this lost theory in the law the Journal of keeper cpias is a page of inor text from the back of the Warhammer 40K Third Edition rule book published in 1998 in Warhammer 40K the past is often a mystery the people of the 41st millennium are only dimly vaguely aware of the events of Prior Millennia particularly of any events prior to the coming of the emperor the ways in which Humanity progressed to be capable of leaving Earth the first human Interstellar Empires the development of the powerful Technologies the Imperium still makes use of all of these are basically lost to time in much the same way as we have no idea what happened prior to about 5,000 years ago the five Millennia before the emperor's great crusade in m30 was known as the age of strife when great warp storms caused Humanity to fracture and devolve into thousands of competing independent civilizations and this period acts as something of a barrier so much knowledge was lost that the humans of the 41st Millennium have very little idea of how things were before it the Journal of keeper cias presents us with one imperial Department's best attempt to reconstruct this retold in the sort of tones usually reserved for mythology keeper cias is introduced in fact introduces himself as The Keeper of the library Sanctus on terror charged with a lifelong aim to compile a history of the human race or at least as much as the keepers can piece together at the end of the 41st Millennium and in this single page of text he lays out their best guess of how Humanity evolved into a starfaring race there's a bit of setup at the start so I'll just read the relevant part but technically I am just reading from a book so I guess I better put on some background music okay dramatic voice and so it was that in the first age of man the Golden Age there is the Emperor unseen and unheralded he prepares the old Earth for the coming of mankind and he watches and he waits he is joined by the first men of the golden race fine of limb and strong of mind yet still the emperor is content to wait in Shadow to watch and learn from mankind the golden race spreads across the face of old Earth multiplying and establishing order and civilization on the Anarchy of nature in time the second men of the stone race appear and in their weight come many miracles and Marvels of technology that strengthen the stone men's power but are also harnessed by those of the golden race although physically inferior to the golden race and not of philosophical temperament and disposition the stone men have in them the conjuration of great artifices and mechanisms in time the golden race looks to the Stars to expand their Dominion the stone race builds great Machines of power that send both men of stone and Men of gold Into The Ether however once the burgeoning race of mankind has taken its first steps into the greater Cosmos the golden race dwindles in influence through their dependence on the artifices of the stone race thus the Golden Age comes to an end and the stone men Prevail our calculations from the most distant and archaic records and through constellar comparison have dated the end of the golden age at 20,000 years previous to our present time for the next 5,000 years the stone race lives through the Dark Age of Technology little can be determined from the Dark Age of technology for the majority of existing records concerning that period are gathered in the librarius omnis of Mars and none outside the highest ranks of the adeptus mechanicus can gain access past its most determined Guardians keeper Mal rubius tried once but to no avail we have surmised that during the Dark Age of of Technology the men of stone create the Iron Men to help them in the building of their great Empire at first the iron men are as servants willing to do the bidding of their masters with no thoughts however the Iron Men as All Creatures do evolve and grow until they are the equal of the stone race and beside each other they set about conquering the Galaxy the Dark Age of technology is an era of machines and artificial devices used by the ston men and later the iron men in their Endeavors many of the technical Marvels that the priesthood of Mars sustain can be traced to their origins in the Dark Age of technology and it is at the end of this period that the great organization now known as the adeptus mechanicus was founded during the Dark Age of Technology the AER ancestors of the imperium's navis nobility are born and through their unique prowess mankind forges through the Stars weapons of great destruction now the aggression of alien enemies pushing back the frontiers of Mankind's dominions the end of the Dark Age of technology is the most obscure region in Mankind's evolutionary tale for whatever reasons and differences in ideology the stone men and the Iron Men fell to Waring with each other the iron men were possessed of no soul an anathema to any true man the stone men in their final acts of self-preservation annihilate the iron men who have turned from Ally to Foe and even those of the iron race who retained their former loyalties to their one-time Masters are destroyed in the fiery Crucible of battle still the emperor in his eternal wisdom awaits the moment to reveal the true path to Mankind's Destiny thus the start of the age of strife is heralded the age of strife sees the collapse of the ancient empire built by the stone men mankind is split asunder there is no race of man just Waring factions competing with each other in the direst Perils the Galaxy could offer seeing Humanity's weakness alien dominance grows in power once again the arms of the stone men left to ruin the protection of the Iron Men destroyed in the last years of the Dark Age of [Music] technology so that's the basic story at least the first time it's published the men of gold exist existed in this version of the story The Emperor comes first and then the golden men and they're great then we get the stone men they just appear in this and they're not as philosophical and more technological and the stone race build technology that allows both sorts of humanity to travel to different Stars while both sorts of men work together the stone men overtake the golden men in around the 20th Millennium depending on which timeline you use that would be potentially about halfway through the Dark Age of technology and after that we don't hear about the golden men then the stone men build the iron men who we know are robots initially as servants and with them the stone men and the Iron Men make Humanity incredibly powerful and then as we know we have the giant Rebellion that leads to War and the collapse of Humanity's Interstellar civilization this is the very first mention of all this and I like how the position of the writer and his obvious bias and lack of knowledge is so present for example cppy refers to the emperor coming before the golden men now we know from other sources that the emperor was born around 6,000 BC and humans have been around for millions of years so we might assume that the golden race were some sort of special humans who appeared after the emperor but we don't know if cpias knows that cpias comes from an age which worships the Emperor as God so it would be totally reasonable for him to think the emperor has just always been there and thus the golden could just mean regular humans or maybe they're ancient humans and we're the stone men who make technology it's deliberately mythological far from definitive very Olaf Stapleton or tolken esque that the historians of the far future have so little knowledge that they have to assemble all this from really vague references that could kind of mean anything but the next Source we get is presented as being from the point of view of someone who well might have been a bit closer to it 2 years later in 20 Andy Chambers ancient history was published a short story included in The Inferno magazine and then republished in a few compilations over the years in this we follow Nathan a press ganged Naval crewman as he comes to terms with his new life as part of a gun crew on an ancient Imperial Battleship where he meets a grizzled old voidsmen called cron cron has been a lowly rating on this ship for what seems like ages and knows all the tips and tricks and secret Roots around and sort of takes Nathan under his wing but cron is also much more than that he has an augg metic eye he seems to be able to heal really fast and during a boarding action he takes out a chaos Space Marine with an energy blast and crucially when that eye is knocked loose for a second it seems that the human underneath is terrified of it going back on almost as if cron is the eye and when it's connected the person underneath has no control anymore anyway cron tells Nathan another version of this story though rather than a history text it's presented like an old mariner's tale C the music once long ago man lived on just one Island the broad oceans surrounded him and he believed himself alone in time man's stature grew and he caught sight of other Islands far off across the deep ocean since he'd seen everything on his Island climbed every Peak and looked under every stone he became curious about the other islands and tried to reach them he soon found the oceans too deep and cold for him to get far not nearly aund of the way to the next Island so man returned and put his hand to other things for an age but in Time food and water and air ran short on man's Island and he looked to the far Islands again because he could not bear the cold of the ocean deeps he fashioned men of stone to go in his place and the stone men fashioned Men of Steel to become their hands and eyes and the stone men went forth with their servants and swam in the Deep otions they found many strange things on the far Islands but none as strange or as wicked as the things that swam in the depths between them ancient hungry things older than man himself but these Beasts of the deep hungered for the true life of man not the half life of stone and so the stone men swam unmolested at first all was well and the men of stone planted man's seed on many islands and in time man learned to travel the oceans himself hiding in stone ships to keep out the cold and hunger of the beasts all was well and man spread to many islands far across the ocean such that some even forgot how they came to be there and that they ever came from just one Island at all Cron's taale wound on telling of how the stone men became estranged from Humanity by their Journeys through the void this led to a time of strife when the men of Steel turned against their Stone Masters and Mankind was Riven aunder by Wars a thousand worlds were scoured by the ancient terrible weapons of those days before the men of stone were overthrown and a million more burned as flesh fought against steel worst of all the beasts arose and were woried as Gods by the survivors once proud and mighty man was reduced to a rabble of gring slaves finally one came who freed man from his shackles and showed him a new way to reach the Stars this path was forged from neither Stone nor steel but simple faith faith guarded man from the beasts of the Void as steel or stone could never do and with that you have now read every single extent piece of information on the men of gold and the men of stone every one of these videos is derived from those two the men of iron or steel if you're cron have a little bit more but let's look at Cron's account first Cron's story is very different in tone but the basic plot is the same he doesn't mention the men of gold at all there are just men later implied to be men of Flesh who then create the men of stone obviously it's all couched in nautical terms but it's clear that regular people couldn't do Interstellar travel because they were at risk from the beasts of the deep who hungered for their true life which is likely to mean warp demons hungering for their souls so they created ston men whose Chief difference seems to be only having a half life which kept them safe from the warp we think this could be taken a number of ways in 40K heavily augmented people with lots of cybernetics have less prominent Souls as do clones as do Paras or blanks they're sort of anti- souls although they usually be described as some sort of horrible anathema to the warp rather than just half live so it's probably not them we know that genetic engineering was commonly employed in the Dark Age of Technology because Navigators came from the same period but as psychers they have even more of a soul so Stone in this story seems to be a standin for something less susceptible to the warp and we can guess this because eventually the stone men make stone ships that were safe for nonstone men to travel in we might assume that that is the gella field which keeps ships in 40K safe from the warp that's stated elsewhere as being from the Dark Age of technology and then we move on to the Revolt of the steel men broadly the same as in cryus interestingly in this the ston men after becoming estranged from the rest of humanity were the first Target of the steel men the men of iron during their revolt and only after the stone men were gone did they turn onto the flesh men so crom tells broadly the same story as cpias with a few differences and while it's never explicitly said it's heavily implied that the thing that is crom might be speaking from firsthand knowledge whatever the cybernetic parasite thing is it sort of implied he might have been there before we get on to how to interpret all of this let's take a look at the men of iron unlike the other two they've been a pretty consistent presence in Warhammer laws since then though they're also not mentioned as often as you might think the men of iron are sentient machines true artificial intelligence robots who can actually think they pop up in 40K in a few different forms their first proper mention is I think ghost maker by Dan Abnet the first gaun ghost book from 2000 which places it right at the same time as the other two in that the ghosts stumble on an STC Constructor machine that manufactures men of iron though it's been corrupted by chaos and it's destroyed at the end they also pop up in Inferno again in another short story involving the adeptus aretes but don't really learn anything new in either of these they're just portrayed as mostly humanoid robots that can be built once the Horus heresy series started a bit later in 2006 followed by the heresy Game books in 2012 we got a little more info as as you might expect given that the time period of the Horus heresy is a lot closer to all this for example the eendo battle autometer are horrific machines made from neutered Iron Men And while we don't get an explicit description it's implied that these are sort of horrible balls of flailing tentacles rather than the humanoid robots of previous incarnations and later old person sent back in time in the short story Perpetual from 2016 describes the war of the men of iron the cybernetic Revolt as featuring machines that feel a lot more matrixyl sun snuffers that uncoiled like serpents the size of Saturn's rings meanor ingesting data along with the cities that contain them and hurling continents into the heavens omnipage swarms stripping flesh from a billion bones in the blink of an eye at the same time other forms of sentient machine have popped up here and there in the setting the vanar of necromunda have at least one semi functioning STC that is described as being an AI the forge of Trilogy starting in 2012 features a Dark Age ship called the Speranza which is implied to be intelligent though in a sort of Old Slow way bit like the manifolds of Titans and the Space Marine battles novel death of Integrity from 2013 features a ship called the spirit of Eternity which is a much more Lucid character an AI driven mad by its travels through the warp and its treatment by the Imperium and then finally the Blackstone Fortress character you are 25 is confirmed to be a man of iron posing as a mechanicus robot and in his short story also called man of iron he feels very human really there's no confirmation anywhere of which of all these are and are not men of iron we don't know if men of iron means any artificial robot intelligence or if it's just the humanoid ones and ships like the Speranza or the spirit of Eternity are something different the prime role of the men of iron though is as a warning the cybernetic Revolt was a war so huge it made the Horus heresy seem small in comparison only narrowly averted by an alliance of Galactic Empires and in the Wake intelligent machines the silica animus abominable intelligence was outlawed across the Imperium giving rise to the mechanicum of Mars any future robots were required to have human brain tissue at their core and be programmed to follow set instructions it's a story borrowed from a few other CCI franchises and then used to set up the world of 40K which had already been written at the time so how do we Square all this over the years I've seen all sorts of theories online though they're usually pretty much guesswork were the men of gold just humans as KRON describes or were they Advanced humans or humans that predate us or even something recognizable from 40K like perpetuals we don't know I've seen people describe the men of stone as us or as cybernetically enhanced people maybe like cron himself or even suggesting that ships like the Speranza were the men of stone and the men of iron were therefore their literal hands and eyes as cron describes but the men of stone are meant to be half alive with maybe half a soul and that doesn't sound like any of the spaceships we've met that sounds more like cybernetically enhanced people like the mechanicus but there is one other piece of information out of world to look at here in a post in 2016 lorri ging a former editor at the black Library briefly describes chatting with Alan mer the former head of Ip about this concept years later and though this is filtered through a couple of people and years it definitely sounds like Alan Merritt had a plan from his lips the golden men were a genetically engineered Master race with selective breeding kind of like in June not the only thing stolen from June Allen the iron men were obviously machines but the stone in stone men refers to Silicon as in they are organic intelligence but created AR officially I like to think of them as the 13th tribe from battl Star Galactica which are the organic syons which if you haven't seen it are essentially like created beings but in meat bodies so that might have been Alan Merritt's intention at the time but the time these Original Stories were published is quite important all the original Law comes from one very specific time period from around 1998 to 2000 around the launch of Third Edition 40K Third Edition did quite a lot of work reimagining the 40K K Universe in tone it was a lot more Grim dark than the bright colors of second edition and it marks the start of Games Workshop moving away from their previous fantasy inspired law and towards something bigger and more complicated and more unique 4K had started out as a Sci-Fi Port of Warhammer fantasy with many of the same archetypes space elves space Orcs that sort of thing Third Edition removed some of this by by space dwarfs and introduced new factions the dark Eldar the necrons the to the ancient mythology of the war in heaven the Katan and the old ones were all introduced around then giving 40K Universe millions of years of extra prehistory with a load of new unknowable Terrors from the distant past I'd guess that the men of gold stone and iron was part of that redirecting of 40K another option to be picked up and run with if the studio wanted to but as it turned out out Beyond a few short stories at that time it was never really explored it was just one of the ideas left on the table occasionally picked up again in years to come and so while 40K doesn't ever get rid of law all this stuff is still Cannon none of this really tells us what this theory is considered to be in 40K today after all the only law we have is in world and from extremely unreliable narrators the Canon answer might be that all this happened it's all true or that it's just an inaccurate myth the keepers of the library Sanctus were wrong that's very similar to how the old origins of the Dark Angels are treated but there is one modern faction that have referenced the men of stone and gold in recent years and that is the leagues of votan the leagues of votan are a reimagining of the old squat faction the original space dwarves introduced in 2022 and while their law doesn't directly confirm any of this it does slot really nicely alongside it the kin of the leagues are artificially made humans created by their ancestor machines great AI STC constructs called votan they were originally created in the Dark Age of technology to mine the worlds of the galactic core setting sail with their ancestor machines in great generation ships and traveling far from the birth world through the void they could do this because the kin of the leagues are clones but not the bad sort the votan have a great repository of different genetic information and blend this in various ways to make individual kin the kin have adapted over the Millennia usually being deliberately engineered to be short Squat and Powerful but they're also engineered to have less of a war presence which keeps them safe from chaos they also still make use of ironin intelligent robots who are considered equal members of their society the leagues of votan aren't ever directly stated to be involved with the old men of stone mythology but they do fit quite nicely into that timeline they're artificially constructed humans just like Allan said but they're still real people with a real Soul it's just dimmed to protect them against the warp they have created kin of iron and while both of our original sources said that the Iron Men turned on the stone men and wiped them out maybe the colonies in the galactic core were spared this they're famously isolationist after all and while the leagues don't fully remember their own History either in some of their earliest frescos their creators are depicted as a group of golden figures you could totally see the leagues of votan as an example of the sort of thing that the men of stone might have been one specific type of stone men changed over thousands of years in the galactic core but just like in every other video on this subject that would be a theory it's very unlikely the way Warhammer law works that this is intended as confirmation that cpias and cron were write all along it's much more likely that whoever was writing the law for the leagues wanted to draw on something that existed in the world and add another layer to the mystery rather than simply confirming that something's true the stories from back in 2000 are just as likely to be myth as they always were so there everything written about the men of Golden Stone and a little bit more about the men of iron ancient history or is it thanks for watching and if you'd like to see more retrospectives of 40K law then there should be a little video coming up on the right and if you'd like to support the channel have a look in the description below where there are things like patreons and like And subscribe and and you know stuff see you [Music] [Music]

Channel: Arbitor Ian

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Length: 29min 1sec (1741 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 13 2024