EQEmu was called Ethernalquest and started in earnest in the early months of 2000, off the back of the ShowEQ project. It went through a few iterations before it turned into EQEmu.
ShowEQ was developed in the Fall of 99 and there were zone dumps of mobs starting to be taken in late November '99. I found a sheet of them:
https://github.com/dbsanfte/eq-archi...ster/npc_dumps