WMG / Pyramids

WMGs for Pyramids. Warning: Potential unmarked spoilers.

Dios is not a stable time loop

Somewhere in his future, he is forced to adopt a human who ends up practically (and possibly literally) living in the scripts. The elder is killed by a collapsing pyramid or something, and the "apprentice" takes up the post of Moderately Appreciable Vizier.

Dios is the Spirit of Djelibeybi.

See American Gods, or (better) Hetalia: Axis Powers. Djelibeybi stagnates because he does.

• Or, quite possibly, he stagnates because Djelibeybi does. He ultimately disappears becuase he's so rooted in the old ways, a changing of the ways means a new Anthropomorphic Personification is needed.

Dios was called into being as a deliberate part of Djelibeybi's creation by Khuft's camels.

Because who'd be more inclined to field-test the recursive nature of space/time than a bunch of genius theoretical mathematicians? And who, if not camels, would reason that if you want humans to start work on hayfields and stables, you need somebody to prod those lazy apes with a stick?

The Great Pyramid's detonation, not the History Monks, is to blame for the time-displaced philosophers in Small Gods.

Ephebe is close enough to Djelibeybi to travel there within less than a day on camelback, and we know that blowback from its detonation sent Dios back 7000 years. Prior to this, we see the Great Pyramid not only twisting time and space, but absorbing the flares of temporal energy from neighboring pyramids. So when Teppic inhumed the thing, it actually contained more accumulated time than even the whole of Djelibeybi could hold, so it spewed these surplus energies out randomly in all directions, beyond the river nation's very slender borders. While the Men In Saffron might indeed have acted to tidy up much of the resulting mess, a random burst of temporal flux struck the tavern where Xeno and Ibid were debating over lunch, and swept them back a hundred years into the past, to appear in Small Gods. (Being, y'know, Xeno and Ibid, they may or may not have noticed the difference.)

• If nothing else, it makes a bit of thematic sense given Djelibeybi's conservativism that there would some impact in areas that used to be part of Djelibeybi's borders (before they sold them off to pay for more pyramids).

The pyramids' history-halting effect on time wasn't entirely confined to Djelibeybi.

The neighboring countries, Ephebe and Tsort, are nearly as antiquated in their culture as Djelibeybi, and nearby Omnia was almost as averse to change as they are. Even Ankh-Morpork itself was subject to Medieval Stasis for centuries prior to, and in the early years of, the Vetinari administration. It's only after the pyramids are destroyed that we start seeing novels where modern-day cultural phenomena like movies or rock and roll start temporarily emerging in the Circle Sea region, and even later — perhaps after Queen Ptraci has had any surviving pyramids demolished to reclaim the fertile farmland they'd occupied, thus removing the last sources of the time-burning effect — when lasting social changes like the clacks system or multiculturalism become established.

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