Welcome to the Discworld & Pratchett Wiki. Have fun, contribute and be warned articles may contain nuts and spoilers to the plots of the books.

Tsort

From Discworld & Pratchett Wiki

Jump to: navigation, search

Strong neighbor of Djelibeybi and historical enemy of Ephebe, Tsort is a walled Kingdom on the continent of Klatch, by the Circle Sea. Presumably, it is located in the Tsort valley, near the Tsort river. Tsort, not to be confused with Tsorta, a small village around 1.8 kilometres from Tsort that was destroyed, seems to be militaristic, and the commander of the fleet is called the Imperiator.

Tsort doesn't boast the feature of having famous philosophers, but is notable for having for a while imitated Djelibeybi in pyramid-building, as seen by the Great Pyramid of Tsort, long since gone. The pyramid was said to have held the wisdom of Tsort from ages past, and comprised of 1,003,010 blocks of limestone, built over 60 years. Inscribed on the interior of its walls was an ancient prophecy detailing how the world was going to be destroyed if the eight spells of the Octavo weren't said on Hogswatch of one year in the Century of the Fruitbat. Tsort's written language is comprised of hieroglyphs.

There is also, of course, the famous Elenor of Tsort, a beautiful woman stolen from Ephebe by King Mausoleum, causing the Tsortean Wars, in which a Tsortean Horse was used, and there was a Tsortean hero whose heels were his only vulnerability.

Major appearances of the location or the country as a military entity in: Eric, Pyramids and Small Gods.

Annotation

While Ephebe is clearly based on Ancient Greece with all the knobs turned up to eleven, Tsort is not so clear-cut. There is a clear reference to ancient Troy (above), which was situated on the west coast of modern-day Turkey. However, all the other references point to the ancient Persian Empire, (which in its heydey included the site of Troy). The Persians built step pyramids (ziggurats) and had refined their own heiroglyphics into the cuneiform script which is the immediate precessor of all modern scripts (both Greek and Hebrew alphabets borrowed heavily from cuneiform, and of course our modern Latin script is a Roman adaptation of Greek lettering). And of course Greece and Persia were traditional enemies and fought many wars, as befits geographical neighbours the world over.

Personal tools
In other languages