It depends how you read it but it seems like access to the Eve Gate was controlled by mega-corporations. The early settlers, and we don’t know how many, seem to have bought their claim from other people. It makes sense that some Terran conglomerate ran things, built gates to the colonies and steered those colonists to their claim. That is more or less the way that the story of the Jove is related by Grious in Templar One, when he talks about the Enheduanni. As he is discussing events that happened around 15,000 years previously, on the other side of two imperial collapses its on a par with us talking about some ancient legend retold over a few millennia. Later on the Talocan appear and don’t appear to have built anything much in New Eden but constructed a Dyson swarm at Caroline’s Star and Anoikis, a complex of 2500 systems navigable by wormholes.
The names are possibly immaterial, but it feels like there was a group, maybe a corporate division, or even divisions, tasked with constructing gates and managing logistics for the colonies. The Empires of today are all descended from colonies that collapsed into the dark ages due to losing their supply routes from the Terran sector. Given the ‘Gigantic Construction Ships’ people skilled at building gates from materials gathered in system and able to navigate without gates themselves, its not hard to imagine that they could happily survive as space nomads, trying to get home. We don’t honestly know. There could have been a single group, or it may have been a number of separate groups. The names Talocan and Enheduanni both come from the Jove and they only occupied seven systems in a single constellation, whereas ancient stargates are found all over the place. Anoikis is confusing, the Orbital Lattice was built around 6,000 years ago, but some of the structures in Anoikis are listed as being 12,000 years old. It could just be bad archaeology.
Anoikis does seem to be have been completely navigable, controlled by a network of Epicenters. The Triglavians have a network of navigable gates in Abyssal space, it makes sense that the two groups might be connected. Its not clear whether they are descendants of some part of the original builder groups, or simply found and reverse engineered their technologies. Eve lore is never that specific, there are possibilities we can explore with stories.
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