The Annotated Pratchett File, v7a

Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas, which means, more or less: “The sower [i.e. God] in his field controls the workings of his tools [i.e. us]”. Some correspondents questioned the correctness of this translation, so if anyone has a good reference to something else I’d love to hear it.

The magic Sator square also has the property that it can be ‘unfolded’ into two “A PATER NOSTER O” strings that form a cross with the ‘N’ as a pivot element (sorry, proper graphics will have to wait until a future edition of the APF). The ‘A’ and the ‘O’ stand for alpha and omega.

- [p. 107/98] “And I seem to remember he spoke very highly of the soak.

It’s a kind of bazaar.”

Punning on ‘souk’, meaning a Middle Eastern marketplace; and the verb ‘soak’, meaning to charge (and get) exorbitant prices.

- [p. 122/110] “the kind of spaghetti that would make M. C. Escher go for a good lie down [...]”

Maurits C. Escher: Dutch (yeah!) graphic artist of this century, well-known for his tangled, paradoxical pictures of optical illusions and plane-filling tilings. Read Douglas Hofstadter’s Goedel, Escher, Bach for much, much more information.

- [p. 122/111] “It looks like someone has taken twice five miles of inner city and girded them round with walls and towers,” he hazarded.

From Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan:

“So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girded round”

- [p. 122/111] “[...] ‘sherbet and, and—young women.”

‘Sherbet’ is a cooling Oriental fruit drink (also a frozen dessert) as well as a fizzy sweet powder children eat as a sweet, and which comes in a cardboard tube with a liquorice ‘straw’ at the top. To get to the sherbet you bite off the end of the liquorice and suck through it. See also the annotation for p. 104/104 of The Light Fantastic.

- [p. 125/113] “[...] pretty much of a miracle of rare device.”

Coleridge’s Kubla Khan:

“It was a miracle of rare device

A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!”

- [p. 125/113] “My name is Creosote, Seriph of Al Khali, [...]”

Ok, lessee: Creosote parodies the proverbially rich Croesus (king of Lidya—which lies in what is now Turkey—in the 6^th century BC), ‘Serif’ is a typographical term which also puns on ‘caliph’, and ‘Al Khali’ is pronounced ‘alkali’ (just covering all the bases here, as my original source put it), but probably refers to the Rub’ al Khali desert in Arabia.

Creosote itself is actually the name for an oily liquid mixture of organic chemicals, resulting as a by-product from the industrial burning of coal or wood.

- [p. 126/114] The hashishim as the ‘original Assassins’.

The English word ‘assassins’ was originally used to denote a group of fanatical Ismailis (a Shi’ite Muslim sect) who, between 1094 and 1273, worked for the creation of a new Fatimid caliphate, murdering prominent individuals. They murdered prominent individuals; hence, ‘assassin’ in English came to mean a politically motivated murderer.

The name derives from the Arabic “hashashin”—Marco Polo and other European chroniclers claimed that the Assassins used hashish to stimulate their fearless acts. For example, Brewer writes:

Assassins: A band of Carmathians, collected by Hassa, subah of Nishapour, called the Old Man of the Mountains, because he made Mount Lebanon his stronghold. This band was the terror of the world for two centuries, when it was put down by Sultan Bibaris. The assassins indulged in haschisch (bang), an intoxicating drink, and from this liquor received their name.

For more information, see also the Hawkwind song ‘Hassan I Sabbah’ on their album Quark, Strangeness and Charm.

- [p. 126/114] Creosote’s poetry is mostly based on Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The poem parodied on this page goes:

‘A book of verses underneath the bough

A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou’

- [p. 127/115] “They spent simply ages getting the rills sufficiently sinuous.”