Note that MgT2 has apparently misspelled the name: according to T5, they are the Ess
aray, not Ess
eray. And I am not saying this simply to nit-pick, but I believe it is important in order to interpret who they are supposed to be.
As noted, on the T5.00 CD (p. 417) there is the IISS "Secret Map" from the time of the IISS Second Survey (ca 1065), which noted the "Essaray", along with a number of other populated regions about the galaxy with accompanying "redacted" text. On the original T5 CD, there is an earlier version of this map that labelled this area "
SRAL". "Essaray" is fairly clearly a "spelled out" version of "
S-
R-
A-L" (the "L" having been dropped in the final version).
So what is
SRA(L)? I have pored over the redacted parts of the Secret Second Survey text for quite sometime after T5's publication, and have been able to reconstruct about 35% of it with a fairly high degree of confidence level. I did this by looking closely at those parts of the letters that rise above and fall below the strike-thru, and logically deducing from the grammar and logic flow of the sentence (and a bit of intuition) what certain words most likely were, which often in turn suggested further words surrounding those that fit the parts of letters in accompanying text.
My reading of the part about the
Essaray and the
Barren Arm is as follows ("recovered" text is in
bold italics):
