Pyramids: A Discworld Novel: 7

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Like the real Egypt, Djelibeybi has several different gods for the same thing (in the real world, this was due to Egyptian culture existing and evolving for millennia and assimilating Greek, Hittite etc gods alongside their original ones). This means that, among other things, they all fight for who gets the job of moving the sun around, with a nearby priest acting as a sports commentator to describe it. Historical Beauty Upgrade: Quite common to all the pharaohs, apparently, starting with Khuft. When Pteppic has a vision of his distant ancestor, he finds the man looks a bit less Mighty Father of His People and more "disreputable camel salesman". Drunken Song: Teppic and his friends get drunk after passing the exam, and end up singing "A Wizard's Staff Has a Knob on the End". Broadly, therefore, the three even now lurching across the deserted planks of the Brass Bridge were dead drunk assassins and the men behind them were bent on inserting the significant comma.” Friendly Enemy: Though the elite and citizenry of Ephebe and Tsort may hate each other dearly, their soldiers (or at least their commanders) don't appear to hold a particular grudge.

Pyramids by Terry Pratchett | Waterstones Pyramids by Terry Pratchett | Waterstones

Rambling Old Man Monologue: While in Tsort, Pteppic attends a symposium with the so-called greatest storyteller on the Disc. Sadly, he's clearly past his prime, and the story comes out like this, with the guy scarcely able to remember any of the details.Este libro en cuestión pertenece a la saga de las “antiguas civilizaciones” sin embargo no tiene un enlace directo con otras de las sagas ni con el siguiente libro por lo que me dispuse a ello. La premisa no era mala, típico libro de Prachett, me dije a mi misma: conociéndote seguro que te ríes por alguna tontería. The Shuttered Palaceis a sex manual like Roundworld's Kamasutra and The Perfumed Garden for the Soul's Recreation, a 16th-century Arabic work by Sheikh Nefzaoui. The fact that Ptraci nudges Teppic, makes this even more obvious – a clear reference to the British lexicon of using ‘nudge, nudge’ and ‘wink, wink’ to imply sexual innuendo. The most well know example is of course Monty Python's ‘ Nudge, Nudge, Wink, Wink’ sketch. Carpe Jugulum does reference the design on the staff of Dios, the High Priest, as one of the many designs the Count inoculates his children to.

Pyramids by Terry Pratchett - AbeBooks Pyramids by Terry Pratchett - AbeBooks

The side characters are all well formed. I loved Teppicymon when he was a ghost commenting how silly all the pyramid nonsense was.I find this one of the funniest early works, showing that Pratchett trained his muscles enough and is coming closer and closer to ingenuity and unique telling talent. From now on, each book is a total must read, except of the later ones which turn dark and are sometimes so different that it may be difficult to find traces of Pratchetts´early, lighthearted, exceptionally funny, writing in them. And I don´t mean a bit sad or something, I mean depressingly and frustratingly showing the darkest sides of humankind in pictures ineradicable out of the readers´ mind.

Pyramids Quotes by Terry Pratchett - Goodreads

Insane Troll Logic: The reason both armies build an army of wooden horses. The reasoning goes that if the enemy is stupid enough to try it they're stupid enough to fall for it. Most of the Djel gods are equipped with seemingly-random animals' heads ... except for Bunu, the Goat-Headed God of Goats.

The country of Djelibeybi, the meaning of which ‘translates’ as ‘Child of the [River] Djel’ (Djel i Beybi) is an obvious play on the British gummy candy ‘Jelly Baby’ and this translation plays on Herodotus's famous claim that Egypt was the ‘gift of the Nile.’ Its name may also be a pun on Djellaba which is a loose woollen cloak worn by Arabs. Djelibeybi is the Discworld's equivalent of Ancient Egypt. It is the main setting of the novel. The country is about two miles wide along the length of the Djel, serving as a buffer zone between Tsort and Ephebe. Ephebe is the Discworld equivalent of Ancient Greece and Tsort is mainly based on Persia with some aspects of Troy mixed in. Teppic winced. “To be honest, I’m not sure,” he said. “But I don’t think so. They’ve got something they do it with, I think it’s called a mocracy, and it means everyone in the whole country can say who the new Tyrant is. One man, one—” He paused. The political history lesson seemed a very long while ago, and had introduced concepts never heard of in Djelibeybi or in Ankh-Morpork, for that matter. He had a stab at it anyway. “One man, one vet.” Though all the characters, unsurprisingly, feel British at their core. You've got the rather naïve protagonist dragged around by circumstance, who also somehow also causes revolutionary change in his society. The pragmatic, sexy girl. A wily, hidebound head priest. Swathes of one-note supporting characters, 99.5% of whom are male. Maybe reading Cranford in tandem made the biases of this book stand out more, but come on. There is only one central character who's a woman, and maybe two very minor female characters in the whole thing, and otherwise it's wall-to-wall dudes. Cats Are Mean: Dios insists cats must be worshipped, but Teppic can't help but feel if he has to worship cats they should be elegant-looking creatures, not the vicious, yellow-eyed little bastards who claw him the minute he gets near. I sense a proto- Small Gods or Hogfather in some occasional ponderings on belief. During part of the story, legendary figures such as gods come to perceptible life. Believing that a monstrous dung beetle rolls the sun across the sky is quite a different thing than a literal, actual monstrous dung beetle rolling the sun across the sky. Especially when it's in competition with a charioteer, and other mythological conceptions about the sun.