When people ask “Who were the first Jedi?” they usually mean it literally. They want a founder. A first Grand Master. Somebody you can point to and say, that’s where it started.
So instead of guessing, here’s what we actually know so far about the very beginning of the Jedi Order in canon.
The First Jedi Temple on Ahch-To
Canon points us to Ahch-To as the Jedi’s starting line. It’s described as the world where the Jedi Order was founded, and its sacred island is the site of the first Jedi Temple.
What’s interesting is how that temple is described. It isn’t presented like the Coruscant Temple at all—it’s ancient, worn down by time, and it still holds fragments of the earliest Jedi identity. The Databank even notes that visitors can find mosaics depicting the first Jedi inside.
That’s why the Ahch-To scenes in The Last Jedi matter more than they look at first glance. When Rey finally reaches Luke, he isn’t hiding in some random hut at the edge of the galaxy — he’s living beside what’s basically Jedi bedrock. StarWars.com even frames it that way: after everything that happened, Luke retreats to Ahch-To, “the legendary site of the first Jedi temple.”
So this is our first trail for figuring out who the first Jedi were, since the first Jedi Temple was built on Ahch-To.
The Prime Jedi Mosaic
As you might remember, when Luke is explaining things to Rey in The Last Jedi, there’s a moment where he’s sitting beside a mosaic on Ahch-To. In the film it’s hard to make out clearly, but The Art of Star Wars: The Last Jedi gives us a much cleaner look at what it’s meant to be.
The book describes it like this: “Set into the floor of the Ahch-To temple is an ancient mosaic. According to the Caretakers, it is an image of the Prime Jedi, the first of the Order, in a state of meditation and balance.”
And with that, we get one step closer—not a full biography yet, but at least a clearer clue about what canon is pointing to when it talks about the very first Jedi: the Prime Jedi.
Then, in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker junior novelization, we get another hint: the first Jedi may have been called the Prime, a title linked to an ancient name—Kli the Elder. The book even says, ‘The Prime is One, but the Jedi are many.’
From here, we can at least put a rough date on the very beginning. Star Wars: Timelines places the creation of the Jedi Order at around 25,025 BBY.
Then only a few years later—around 25,020 BBY—Huyang is already online, and he’s training Jedi younglings in lightsaber construction.
Conclusion
And that’s what we have so far: canon points to the Prime Jedi as the earliest figure tied to the Order, with the first Jedi Temple on Ahch-To marking the Jedi’s starting line. Then, not long after, Huyang is already around helping train younglings—showing how early the Jedi were building traditions that lasted for tens of thousands of years.