More than 100,000 years before the Battle of Yavin, species including the Columi, Gree, Kwa, and Sharu were already exploring interstellar space. Their surviving records are fragmentary, legendary, or both. Across those broken traditions appears another presence: the Celestials, also called the Architects, beings credited with engineering star systems, manipulating hyperspace on a galactic scale, and using client species such as the Gree, Kwa, and Killiks to construct works later civilizations could scarcely explain.
The strongest surviving synthesis
Jason Fry and Paul Urquhart's material for The Essential Guide to Warfare provides the clearest synthesis of this era. A cut prologue called “The Vanished” was published by StarWars.com in 2013. Framed as an Imperial-era debriefing of pre-Republic specialist Insmot Bowen, it explicitly acknowledges that the evidence is sparse and frequently mythologized.
The article identifies four early starfaring species by name: the Columi, Gree, Kwa, and Sharu. It also connects the Killiks to the Celestial system of labor and client species. The account does not present a simple linear empire with a known founding date. Instead, it presents a prehistoric network reconstructed from technological anomalies, ruined sites, art motifs, old texts, and later legends.
Who were the Celestials?
The most responsible answer is that later scholars did not know. The Celestials were remembered under multiple names, including the Architects and, in some Gree traditions, the Ancient Masters. No reliable record explains their biological appearance, original homeworld, political structure, or the beginning of their dominion.
What survives is indirect evidence of capability. Later researchers attributed impossible-looking astronomical engineering to them: star systems with artificial signatures, structures on a scale beyond conventional engineering, hyperspace anomalies that appeared deliberately shaped, and artifacts capable of moving or destroying worlds.
This makes the Celestials less like a normally documented civilization and more like an archaeological hypothesis supported by recurring material patterns.
The Columi
The Columi were among the earliest known species to explore beyond their home system. The StarWars.com account says they withdrew from the stars after contact with the Celestials. Exactly why remains uncertain.
That withdrawal matters because technological development is not always a one-way movement toward greater expansion. A civilization can deliberately contract, isolate itself, or reject further exploration after political trauma, ecological risk, military defeat, or contact with a vastly more powerful society.
The Columi therefore complicate the usual science-fiction assumption that interstellar civilization naturally produces permanent expansion.
The Gree
The Gree appear in this prehistoric network as both major technological actors and probable client or servant species of the Celestials. Their later traditions remembered the Celestials as Ancient Masters and preserved fragmentary accounts of their disappearance.
This fits the earlier IDS Gree dossier: the Gree were extraordinarily sophisticated, yet some of their greatest technologies may have emerged within a larger political system they did not control. Advanced technology does not necessarily equal political sovereignty.
The Kwa
The Kwa were another ancient starfaring species associated with Celestial service. Legends connected them with massive pyramidal architecture, advanced transportation technology, and the Infinity Gates found on worlds such as Dathomir.
The Kwa are important because they demonstrate how infrastructure can outlive the social order that created it. A functioning gate or monumental structure may survive long after its operators, technical language, political hierarchy, and intended purpose are gone.
The Sharu
The Sharu followed a radically different response to Celestial contact. Later accounts suggest they hid from greater powers by abandoning obvious technological sophistication and adopting an appearance of cultural primitivism.
If taken as broadly historical, this is an extraordinary strategy. Technological simplicity becomes camouflage. A society may conceal capabilities not because it lacks knowledge, but because displaying knowledge creates political danger.
This challenges one of the most persistent biases in galactic history: the assumption that visible technological complexity accurately measures what a society knows.
The Killik hives
The Killiks also appear in later reconstructions as laborers or client populations within Celestial projects. Legends repeatedly associates Killik hive societies with vast construction efforts and with locations whose origins later inhabitants struggled to explain.
Hive organization creates a different model of labor from the guilds, armies, or bureaucracies of later galactic states. If Celestial projects used entire hives, then monumental engineering may have depended on collective social forms as much as on machines.
Was the Corellian system built?
The official Author's Cut presents one of the most striking claims in all of Legends deep history: the Corellian system may be artificial. Later scientists noted unusual planetary chemistry and orbital characteristics that they considered inconsistent with ordinary natural formation.
The proposed explanation was that the Celestials moved worlds into place. Centerpoint Station, long mysterious in Legends, was interpreted as part of the machinery that made such engineering possible.
IDS treats this as an in-universe scholarly conclusion, not as a real astronomical claim. What matters historically is that later scientists believed the material evidence strongly supported artificial construction.
Centerpoint Station and the archaeology of impossible machines
Centerpoint Station illustrates a recurring problem in ancient-technology archaeology. Later societies can encounter a machine whose scale, function, or energy requirements exceed their own engineering assumptions. At that point, interpretation becomes contested.
One observer may call it a colony ship. Another may call it a weapon. Another may identify it as a planetary tractor-repulsor. Each interpretation depends on available evidence and on what later societies consider technologically possible.
Ancient artifacts do not arrive with authoritative labels. Their meaning is reconstructed.
Engineering hyperspace itself
The Celestial traditions go beyond moving planets. The same StarWars.com account attributes the circumferential hyperspace barrier around the galaxy, or at least parts of it, to deliberate engineering. The western hyperspace anomalies near the Deep Core were interpreted as remnants of a much larger system.
If true within the Legends framework, this would mean prehistoric engineering shaped not merely planets but the later geography of galactic travel. Entire regions of exploration, trade, warfare, and political expansion would be constrained by infrastructure created before recorded civilization.
This is infrastructure at its most extreme: later societies live inside a spatial order they did not build and may not understand.
Serpents, pyramids, and recurring motifs
Later scholars also searched for artistic signatures linking ancient cultures to Celestial contact. Recurring serpentine or tentacular imagery and pyramidal construction appeared on multiple worlds associated with prehistoric civilizations.
Such similarities can be suggestive, but they are not proof by themselves. Independent societies can produce similar shapes. Later cultures can copy older monuments. Archaeologists can also see patterns because they expect to find them.
The StarWars.com source explicitly frames Celestial attribution as guesswork in many cases. IDS preserves that caution.
Empire before the Republic?
The relationship between the Celestials and their client species raises a political question: should the Celestial system be called an empire? Later scholars described servant species, labor populations, enormous construction projects, and power concentrated in beings whose motives were unknowable.
That resembles empire in some respects, but the evidence is too incomplete to reconstruct administrative institutions, tribute systems, citizenship, law, or territorial governance. “Dominion” may be safer than assuming a later-style state.
This distinction matters because historians often force ancient societies into familiar categories. Calling every large prehistoric network an empire can hide differences in how power actually operated.
The Rakata enter the picture
The same prehistoric traditions identify the Rakata as the “Soul Hunters” who fought the Celestials and their client species. Gree texts remembered catastrophic forces called the Gray Swallowing and the Faceless Mouths, while later historians linked these stories to Rakatan expansion.
The source is much firmer about later conflict between the Rakata and the Kwa and Gree than it is about the exact fate of the Celestials. The Killiks vanish. The Gree and Kwa suffer devastation. The Celestials disappear from the historical stage.
This transition leads directly toward the next major deep-history dossier: the Rakatan Infinite Empire.
The anthropology of a prehistoric interstellar system
This period is valuable because it breaks the assumption that galactic civilization begins with the Republic. Long before Republic institutions, species were already moving between stars, building monumental infrastructure, entering unequal political relationships, withdrawing from expansion, hiding technological capability, and preserving memory through myth.
It also shows why technological artifacts cannot be separated from social relations. A hypergate implies builders, maintainers, training, access rules, political authority, and decisions about who may travel. A planetary engineering project implies labor organization on a nearly unimaginable scale. A monument implies not only construction but meaning.
The oldest interstellar history is therefore not just a catalogue of machines. It is a history of power, labor, knowledge, memory, and unequal contact.
Canon versus Legends
Where the first starfarers fit
Sources and further reading
- Jason Fry and Paul R. Urquhart, Star Wars: The Essential Guide to Warfare, Del Rey, 2012.
- “The Vanished” and “Traces of the Celestials,” The Essential Guide to Warfare Author’s Cut, StarWars.com
- Daniel Wallace and Jason Fry, Star Wars: The Essential Atlas, Del Rey, 2009.
- Celestial/Legends, Wookieepedia
- Kwa/Legends, Wookieepedia
- Sharu/Legends, Wookieepedia