Notes: On the whole, this also seems to form a distinct group that generally has a nomadic existence (i.e. they are based in spaceships, rather than having a home planet). At least one group of these Cybermen existed before The Tenth Planet (the ones we see in The Invasion). These Cybermen fight wars against early human colony planets, and also the Cyber War referred to in Revenge of the Cybermen.
David Banks (in his book Cybermen and novel Iceberg) states that there was an early schism among the Cybermen - one group stayed on Mondas and only reluctantly adopted full cybertisation (the group here named as the Type I Cybermen), while another embraced the technology (and became the Type III seen in The Invasion).
The covers of Human Resources and Legend of the Cybermen depict Cybermen of the same type as The Invasion, and are set before the discovery of Telos. The Cybermen in Iceberg itself are a hybrid version - Cybermen who survived The Invasion, in part because they’ve adapted technology from the Cybermen seen in The Tenth Planet.
As noted above, despite the cover image, it’s possible that the Cybermen in Illegal Alien are of this type.
It may or may not be significant that the Cybermen in The Invasion wear their chest units the other way up to the ones in Revenge of the Cybermen. The chest units are the same prop, and there’s a circular detail on it - on the top in The Invasion, the bottom in Revenge of the Cybermen.
One of these Cybermen ended up in Vorg’s MiniScope in Carnival of Monsters, and it’s also the type of Cyberman the Doctor remembers in The War Games.
Type IV: “Throwback” (future, Telos), “Black Legacy” (unknown timezone, Empire), “Deathworld” (unknown timezone, Empire).
Notes: The comic strip stories are all apparently set when the Cybermen have an interstellar Empire (see “Do The Cybermen Ever Have an Empire?”). They resemble the Type III, but with a slightly more streamlined designed, and far more visible rank insignia.
Type V: Attack of the Cybermen (future, Telos), Earthshock (2526), Silver Nemesis (1988, hope to create a “new Mondas”), “Exodus / Revelation / Genesis” (unknown), “Kane’s Story” (4650, “Empire”).
Notes: Attack of the Cybermen and Earthshock could be near-contemporary stories (they are in this chronology). Both the Type IV (as seen in Revenge of the Cybermen) and Type V (Attack of the Cybermen) Cybermen fought and lost the Cyber War; Type V might be the upgraded model, developed during the fighting, although Cyberman 2 seems to be the genesis of the Earthshock models, refining the Attack of the Cybermen versions.
However, Silver Nemesis (where the Cybermen are slightly redesigned) and “Kane’s Story” are outliers. We don’t have a date for “Exodus / Revelation / Genesis”. The simplest explanation for a group of Cybermen who want a New Mondas in 1988 (Silver Nemesis) is that they’re survivors from Mondas’ destruction in 1986 (The Tenth Planet). Although it’s not mentioned, they could be survivors from Attack of the Cybermen. Perhaps they’re from the base on the moon that’s mentioned and not accounted for - those Cybermen wanted to change history to prevent the destruction of Mondas, so perhaps their back-up plan would be to create “New Mondas”.
What’s interesting is that the Cybermen in Attack the Cybermen definitely have a stolen time travel vessel, there’s some evidence that the ones in Earthshock are time travellers, and the ones in SIlver Nemesis are after Gallifreyan technology. So we might be able to assume that the Type V Cybermen are all be Cybermen from the twenty-sixth century, with limited knowledge of time travel they’ve acquired from stolen technology.
This design seems to have a comeback around the Davros Era, according to “Kane’s Story”.
Type VI: Real Time, Radio Times eighth Doctor strips, The Reaping, “The Flood”.
Notes: The Cybermen continue to evolve, and by the far future they’re on the verge of extinction and apparently have one strategy: acquire a time machine and go back into history to change it.
Type VII: Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel, Army of Ghosts/Doomsday, The Next Doctor, The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang, A Good Man Goes to War, Closing Time.
Notes: First seen as the creations of Cybus Industries in a parallel universe. A Good Man Goes to War is the first time this model is seen without the Cybus Industries logo, perhaps suggesting that “our” Cybermen incorporated the technology into their own, or that the design was developed independently in the main Doctor Who universe.
[1] “Nine thousand years” before Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma. Kiss of Death also mentions Trion’s colonies.
[2] Forty-Five: “False Gods”. In Doctor Who terms, this accounts for why ancient calendars denote a difference in the rising and setting of the sun. As this event is recorded on the box of hieroglyphs in Userhat’s tomb, “Jane” must chronologically kill herself before Userhat acquires her TARDIS.
[3] The Daemons, City of Death.
[4] Pyramids of Mars. Return of the Living Dad, GodEngine and The Quantum Archangel contain the further references.
[5] FP: Ozymandias
[6] FP: Coming to Dust, FP: The Ship of a Billion Years.
[7] FP: Words from Nine Divinities
[8] FP: Coming to Dust, FP: The Ship of a Billion Years, FP: Body Politic, FP: Words of Nine Divinities.
[9] FP: The Ship of a Billion Years
[10] FP: The Judgment of Sutekh, FP: Body Politic.
[11] All according to the Doctor in The Sands of Time (p233-235); he says the Sphinx was built “between eight and ten thousand years ago” (p234).
[12] The Sands of Time (p235).
[13] Pyramids of Mars
The Devil’s in the Detail
Both Pyramids of Mars and The Satan Pit feature a god-like being - Sutekh and the Beast, respectively - who is said to be the inspiration for the Biblical Satan. The two of them even sound the same (purely because Gabriel Woolf portrayed Sutekh and voiced the Beast). The Daemons also features a devil-like being, but no-one in the story quite says that he’s Satan - it’s just that the Daemons have inspired myths of powerful horned beings. Finally, TW: End of Days has another creature named Abaddon that’s apparently of the same race as the Beast in The Satan Pit.
The Beast and Sutekh do not appear to be the same being - not if the Beast truly was imprisoned before the universe began, and only released in Earth’s future - but the two beings’ stories do contain parallels. Much of human mythology in the Doctor Who universe seems to be a mish-mash of dimly-remembered ancient encounters with alien races. It therefore seems possible - and forgivable - that people have elided legends of the Beast and Sutekh, although the extent of this isn’t clear.
[14] Respectively given in The Sands of Time and Series 2 of the Faction Paradox audios.
[15] The Sands of Time. Egyptian mythology can’t decide on Horus’ exact relationship to Set; The Sands of Time (pgs 142, 158) solves this by making Horus a “psi-child” of Osiris, which simultaneously makes him Sutekh’s brother and nephew. The Cult of Sutekh also appears in the New Adventure Set Piece. In the scripts for Pyramids of Mars, the name Osirians is also sometimes spelt (and is always pronounced) “Osirans”.
[16] Pyramids of Mars, The Sands of Time.
[17] Dating FP: Ozymandias, FP: The Judgment of Sutekh (FP audios #2.5-2.6) - The story ends in accordance with Sutekh’s status in Pyramids of Mars.
[18] Pyramids of Mars, The Sands of Time.
[19] The Big Bang. This could happen at any time, but it has an Osirian ring to it.
[20] This happened “generations” before K9: The Curse of Anubis, with the Huducts ruling the Anubians for millennia. K9 did this at some unknown point before K9: Regeneration (possibly while working for the Time Lords). We see pictures of the races the Anubians conquered, not their names. The Anubians resemble the Egyptian god Anubis, and their technology, design, written language and imagery all looks Ancient Egyptian. There’s no suggestion they’ve been to Egypt or even Earth before, though, and so they could well be a race influenced by the Osirians.
[21] Variously sa
id to occur “thousands of years” and “countless millennia” before The Bride of Peladon. In Egyptian mythology, Sekhmet was a daughter of Ra and a warrior goddess of Upper Egypt, although she was sometimes regarded as a more vengeful aspect of Hathor. Her cult was particularly dominant in the twelfth dynasty (1991 BC to 1802 BC), only a few centuries before Erimem’s time. The “dying beer with pomegranate juice” story comes from a myth focused around an annual Sekhmet festival, although this has Ra dying the entire Nile (which turns red every year when it fills with silt).
The Curse of Peladon says that trisilicate can be found on Mars, where Sutekh was imprisoned, so it makes sense that the Osirians would use it to bind Sekhmet. It’s not entirely clear, though, if Sekhmet was deliberately entombed on Peladon or if she was blasted into space at random and happened - very coincidentally - to wind up on a planet loaded with trisilicate, the best means of restraining her. Sekhmet’s claim that she “created” the desert and set Sutekh to rule over it can probably be excused as propaganda, as with talk that she’s the “Queen of the Osirians” (if she is, it’s probably only by virtue of the rest being dead).
[22] “Several millennia” before Barrie wrote Peter Pan, according to The Tomorrow Windows.
[23] “Six thousand years” (pgs 149, 178) before The Glamour Chase.
[24] “Several thousand years” before The Forgotten Army. The Vykoids must be working from wretched intelligence, if they came to Earth expecting to find T-Rexes, Triceratops and Diplodocuses some tens of millions of years after they died out.
[25] “The Gods Walk Among Us”. The archaeologists estimate that the tomb is “five thousand five hundred” years old in 1926, so it was built around 3574 BC.
[26] The TARDIS is plainly seen in some hieroglyphs in Love & Monsters, even though the Ship would not be represented as a phone box icon under such a language system. Egyptian hieroglyphs were in use from 3200 BC to 400 AD.
[27] “2523 years” before Primeval.
[28] “Millennia” before Benny: A Life in Pieces.
[29] “Thousands of years” before The Fires of Pompeii.
[30] “Thousands of years”, if not more, before The Suffering. The “fourth galaxy” could be a reference to the home of the Drahvins in Galaxy 4, and for all we’re told, the exiled woman might hail from their race. Interestingly, both the Drahvins and the race in The Suffering have culled the males of their population.
[31] K9: The Last Oak Tree
[32] “Millennia” before the 2009 portion of TW: Risk Assessment.
[33] The Way Through the Woods. In Europe, the Bronze Age lasted 3200-600 BC.
[34] Dating Timewyrm: Genesys (NA #1) - The Doctor says the TARDIS is heading for “Mesopotamia, 2700 BC”.
[35] “City of Devils”
[36] Dating “The Forgotten” (IDW DW mini-series #2) - It is “most likely around the twenty-sixth century BC”. Menkaure ruled in the late twenty-sixth century BC, although historians can’t be sure of the exact dates. In the Doctor’s personal timeline, this is after Marco Polo but before The Aztecs. He already knows of the Osirians.
[37] Dating The Daleks’ Master Plan (3.4) - The three time machines land at the base of a “Great Pyramid” that has nearly been completed. This might well be the Great Pyramid of King Khufu (Cheops in Greek), one of the Seven Wonders of the World. John Peel’s novelisation of the story names it as such, and also says “Khufu lay in his final illness” (p72). Khufu died in 2566 BC; the Great Pyramid was built over a twenty year period, ending around 2560 BC. The Terrestrial Index pins the date at “2620 BC”; The Discontinuity Guide offers a wider range of “2613 BC - 2494 BC”. Timelink says 2635 BC.
[38] Dating Benny: The Grel Escape (Benny audio #5.1) - The story takes place in ancient Egypt, and it’s entirely possible that the Anubis seen here was an Osirian.
[39] The Skull of Sobek; see the dating notes on this story. It’s not entirely clear if Sobek’s downfall triggered a migration of its culture to other planets, or if the crocodilians had dealings with other species beforehand. If the former is true, the crocodilians must have immense lifespans, as the prince and Snabb are still around ten thousand years later. The fact that Snabb spends a full century scouring one sector of space for the Skull somewhat supports this notion, as does the fact that he only eats once a year (which suggests a slow, life-extending metabolism).
[40] Colony in Space. The date isn’t given, but this is when the Crab Nebula was formed. It was first visible on Earth from 1054.
[41] Unspecified “thousands of years” before Bad Therapy.
[42] City of Death. Scaroth says that he caused “the heavens to be mapped”, and mankind’s first star maps were made in China around 2300 BC.
[43] “Over four thousand years” before The Burning. The entity is drawn to Earth as the result of events in Siberia, 1894, in Time Zero.
[44] According to the Doctor in Four to Doomsday.
[45] Deadly Reunion. It’s suggested the “gods” were the product of the Daemons’ experiments.
[46] “Thousands of years” before The Hounds of Artemis.
[47] The Quantum Archangel
[48] The Time Monster
[49] Dating Fallen Gods (TEL #10) - It’s “the Bronze Age” (p91). This is a retelling of the creation of the Atlantis as related in The Time Monster.
[50] “Nearly four thousand years” before the 1974 component of “Agent Provocateur”.
[51] “The Curse of the Scarab”. The casket is “four thousand” years old. The fourth year of the twelfth dynasty would be around 1988 BC. Pyramids of Mars placed the imprisonment of Sutekh “seven thousand” years ago, but this dating does coincide with the dating given for events of The Sands of Time, perhaps suggesting that the Osirians maintained some sort of presence in ancient Egypt for millennia.
[52] Dating “The Power of Thoueris” (DWM #333) - No date is given, and this is clearly not the height of Osirian power, so it’s been placed at the same time as events of the backstory for “The Curse of the Scarab”.
[53] “Four thousand years” (p21) before The Glamour Chase.
[54] Dating The Sands of Time (MA #22) - The date is given (p57).
[55] The Stones of Blood. The Terrestrial Index dated Cessair’s arrival on Earth at “3000 BC”, but this contradicts the Doctor and Megara, both of whom claim that only “four thousand” years have elapsed since Cessair came to Earth.
[56] SJA: The Thirteenth Stone. There’s no evidence that the practice here of turning alien convicts into rock has any relation to The Stones of Blood.
[57] SJA: The Lost Boy
[58] “Five thousand years” before The Ultimate Treasure.
[59] “Thousands of years” (p236) before Fear Itself.
[60] Deadly Reunion (p115). The first part of the book takes place in 1944, and Persephone says she is three thousand, seven hundred and two years old.
[61] “Several millennia” before “Invaders from Gantac”. The Daleks do not appear to have been created until after this point, so the ones referred to here must be time travellers.
[62] Dating The Slitheen Excursion (NSA #32) - The year is given as “1500 BC” on the back cover and page 25. Real-life renderings of the founder of Athens (Cecrops I) do, in fact, depict him as a human with a giant fish tail for legs. Events here are unrelated to the fall of Atlantis.
[63] Dating The Time Monster (9.5) - The traditional date for the fall of Atlantis is around 1500 BC, and the Doctor states on returning to the twentieth century at the end of this story that it was “three thousand five hundred years ago”. The Terrestrial Index and The Discontinuity Guide both suggested the traditional date of 1500 BC, the FASA Role-playing game claimed 10,000 BC. The TARDIS Logs included the presumed misprint of 1520 AD. Timelink goes for 1529 BC.
[64] The Underwater Menace
[65] The Underwater Menace, The Daemons.
The Fall of Atlantis
We hear of/witness the destruction of Atlantis in three stories: Th
e Underwater Menace, The Daemons and The Time Monster. In The Underwater Menace, the island in question is in the Atlantic, and in The Time Monster, “Atlantis” is another name for the Minoan civilisation in the Mediterranean. In The Daemons, Azal warns the Master that “My race destroys its failures. Remember Atlantis!”. The Terrestrial Index attempts to explain this by suggesting that the Daemons supplied the Minoan civilisation with the Kronos Crystal. This might be true, but there is no hint of it on screen.
[66] Dating Benny: Year Zero (Benny audio #11.3), Benny: Dead Man’s Switch (Benny audio #11.4) and Benny: Epoch (box set #1, contains The Kraken’s Lament, 1.1; The Temple of Questions, 1.2; Private Enemy No. 1, 1.3; Judgement Day, 1.4) - These six stories occur in a central alternate reality (and two subsidiary realities) as crafted by the Epoch. Three years elapse between Dead Man’s Switch and the Benny: Epoch stories, with Benny in stasis. In Judgement Day, she returns to her native era in a timeless state while the universe ages around her, which very much suggests that the Epoch’s timeline/s are located in the past. Rightly or wrongly, Benny suspects this is the case as early as Year Zero. In Epoch: Judgement Day, she tells a robot attendant in 2616 to not recite everything that’s happened in the “last however-many-millennia...” while she was in stasis.
Benny’s unsubstantiated deductions aside, it’s never resolutely established in what era, subjectively speaking, the Epoch timelines exist. Big Finish producer Gary Russell (who took over the Benny audios from John Ainsworth after Dead Man’s Switch) confirmed that the dating was left vague, and that, “the Atlantis Benny knows [in Benny: Epoch] could be any time from real Atlantis to Victorian times, or indeed the twenty-fifth century”. With that in mind, this clutch of stories have been arbitrarily placed as rough contemporaries of the Atlantis seen in The Time Monster.
[67] The background to Benny: Year Zero, given in Benny: Epoch: Judgement Day.
[68] SLEEPY (p102).
[69] As theorised by the Doctor in The Sands of Time (p234); the fifth Doctor and Peri visit a chamber under the Sphinx in The Eye of the Scorpion, so if Thutmose did dig out the Sphinx, he’d finished his work prior to that.
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