Mottoes: MERVS IN PECTVM EN IN AQVAM and QVANTI CANICVLA ILLE IN FENESTRA.

Coat of arms: a shield, supported by two Hippopotames Royales Baillant - one enchaine, one couronne au cou - and surmounted by a Morpork Vautre Huluant, bearing an Ankh d'or, and ornee by a banner with the legend 'Merus In Pectum Et In Aquam'. The shield bisected by a tower en maconnerie sans fenetres and quartered by a fleuve, argent and azure, bend sinister. On the upper-right quarter a field, vert, of brassicae prasinae; on the lower-left quarter a field, sable. On the upper-left and lower right, bourses d'or on a field argent. Below the arms a ribbon with the legend 'Quanti Canicula Ille In Fenestra'.

Pop: 1,000,000 (including the suburbs). Cheif exports: manufactured goods, most of the processed animal and vegetable produce of the fertile Sto Plains, trouble. Main 'invisible' exports: banking, assassination, wizardry, trouble.

Inports: raw materials, people, trouble.

The shield shows the Tower of Art, the oldest building in the city, and also celebrates both the river Ankh and the vast surrounding expanse of brassica fields which have combined to produce the city's prosperity and, to a great extent, its smell.

The younger of the two mottoes, Merus In Pectum Et In Aquam (lit.: 'Pure in mind and water') was devised by a rather high minded committee in the early days of the First Republic, and is considered a jolly good laugh.

The older - and, strangely enough, the more popular - is Quanti Canicula Ille In Fenestra (Lit.: 'How much is that small dog in the window?'). Its origin is the subject of urban legend but can be traced, as can so many of the city's oddities, to the reign of King Ludwig the Tree.

Kings cannot become mad; this is self-evident. Peasants become insane, small traders and craftsmen go mad, nobles become eccentric, and King Ludwig was a little confused and so detatched from reality that he couldn't make contact with it even by shouting and prodding at it with a long stick.

King Ludwig's four-year reign was one of the happiest of the entire monarchial period, and people looked forward to his proclamations on subjects such as the need to develop a new kind of frog and the way invisible creatures spied on him when he went to the lavatory. It was less popular among the nobles. Since it would destroy the entire edifice of the monarchial system to admit that the man from whom all power derived actually did go around all day wearing his underpants on his head, an informal system was devised to suggest that, far from being confused, the King was airing an intellect both rarefied and subtle. Monographs were published, agreeing that the modern frog was indeed hopelessly outdated. There was even a brief vogue for wearing head lingerie.

Anything the King said was treated as an oracular utterance. On the day he was asked to choose from three suggested mottoes for the city, his comment, 'How much is that doggie in the window?', was agreed, by a small committee of courtiers, to be the most acceptable of the King's suggestions, the other two being 'Bduh bduh bduh bduh' and 'I think I want my potty now'.

It has subsequently been suggested that the motto is in fact marvellously devised for Ankh-Morpork, since it neatly encapsulates a) the city's intelligent questioning spirit, b) its concern for mercantile matters, and c) its love of animals. Readers who consider this strange should reflect that the motto on the Great Seal of the United States of America comes from a latin poem about making salad dressing.[1]

Ankh-Morpork is the oldest existing city on the Discworld (and known to its citizens/denizens as the Big Wahoonie). Bisected by the river Ankh, the city is really two cities: proud Ankh, Turnwise of the river, and pestilent Morpork on the Widdershins side, although the pestilence is quite democratic and in fact covers most of the city.

Nestling (or, more accurately, squatting) in the Sto Plains, close to the Circle Sea, the city is theoretically build on loam, although in fact it is built on past incarnations of the city, rather like Troy but without the style.[2]

Ankh-Morpork has been burned down many times in its long history - out of revenge, carelessness, spite or even just for the insurance. Most of the stone buildings that actually make it a city have survived intact. Many people - that is many people who live in stone houses - think that a good fire every hundred years or so is essential to the health of the city since it helps to keep down rats, roaches, fleas and, of course, people not rich enough to live in stone houses. Each time, it is rebuilt using the traditional local materials of tinder dry wood and thatch waterproofed with tar.

It is generally accepted that the original building in the city was the Tower of Art, around which Unseen University grew up as a sort of keep, and some small parts of the first city wall are still visible. Over the centuries, however, the city's centre moved downstream as docks were built on the more navigable parts of the river; and fragments of city walls and the general layout of the roads give Ankh-Morpork the appearance, from the air, of a cut onion, although a cut onion smells rather different. [3]

Over the millenia the city has tried various forms of government; an ancient system of sewers - known only to the Assassins' Guild (Until Men At Arms) - and a few other details testify to a glorious past (glorious being defined as a time when Thousands of People Could Be Persuaded by Men with Swords to Build Big Things out of Stone). There has been monarchy, oligarchy, anarchy and dictatorship. The current system appears to be a sort of highly specialized democracy; as they say in Anhk-Morpork, it's a case of One Man, One Vote - Lord Vetinari is the Man, he has the Vote.

In essence the city is governed as a result of the interplay of various pressure groups. Lord Vetinari positively encouraged the growth of the Guilds, of which there are now some 300 in the city. His reason for doing this may be discerned in his unpublished book The Servant, a compendium of advice and precepts to a young man setting out to govern a fictional city (in the book identified only as AM) in a passage which runs: 'Where there are clearly two sides to a question, make haste to see that these rapidly become two hundred.' In practice, the city's political structure consists entirely of a huge number of pressure groups plotting, fighting, conniving, forming alliances, shouting, scheming, intriguing and making plans, in the middle of which one man is quietly doing things his way.

Economically, the city is the profitable bottleneck between the Sto Plains and the rest of the Discworld. It is a service centre for the hinterland in several senses of the phrase, and carries out all the functions that citizens usually perform for their country cousins, such as selling them the Brass Bridge at a knock down price. It is the big city you go to to seek your fortune. And other people also seek your fortune as soon as you arrive.

While it has many of the attributes of the classical fantasy city - Guilds, walls, wizards and so on - Ankh-Morpork is also a working city, with a very large number of small factories and workshops (generally in Phedre Road and Cable Street areas, and more traditionally along the Street of Cunning Artificers). There is a flourishing cattle market and slaughterhouse district.

Fresh water used to be brought straight into the city centre by a viaduct now barely visible in Water Street, but it fell down centuries ago and, what with one thing and another, no one ever got around to rebuilding it. Water is now drawn from wells, which are very shallow indeed with Ankh-Morpork's high water table. This, along with the slaughterhouses and the cabbage fields and the spice houses and the breweries, is a major component of Ankh-Morpork's most famous civic attribute: its aforementioned Smell.

The citizens are proud of the smell; on a really good day, they carry chairs outside to enjoy it. They even put up a statue to it, to commemorate the time when troops of a rival state tried to invade by stealth one dark night; they managed to get only as far as the top of the walls when, to their horror, their nose plugs gave out. [4]

No enemies have ever entered Ankh-Morpork.

This is not entirely true. Technically they have, quite often; the city welcomes free-spending barbarian invaders, but somehow the puzzled raiders always find, after a few days, that they don't own their own horses anymore, and within a couple of months they're just another minority group with its own graffiti and food shops.

The city's inhabitants have brought the profession of interested bystander to a peak of perfection. These highly skilled gawpers will watch anything, especially if there's any possibility of anyone getting hurt in an amusing way.

The city's 'picturesque' Shades, with its crowded docks, many bridges, its souks, its casbahs, its streets lined with nothing but temples, all point to its cosmopolitan style. It welcomes anyone - regardless of race, colour, class or creed - who has spening money in incredible amounts.

It has been said that the largest dwarfish colony anywhere in the world is in Ankh-Morpork. This may be the case. Certainly the city is home to a large number of dwarfs, a growing number of trolls, and many undead and other special-interest groups. This has caused a number of problems but also some benefits - in jobs, for example. The silicon based trolls gravitate towards messy jobs because, to them, nasty organic substances are of no more account than sand and gravel would be to a human; vampires tend to end up in the meat business, and often run shops catering for those of a kosher persuasion; undead often undertake dangerous tasks, such as working on high buildings, because nothing can happen to them that hasn't happened already.

The associated problems are more traditional. Trolls hate dwarfs, dwarfs hate trolls. It's a symmetrical arrangemant that dates back thousands of years and has accumulated enough ill-feeling that the actual cause is now quite irrelevant. This mutual antagonism has been imported into the city.

Troll skin, which is as flexible as leather but much, much tougher and longer-lasting, is still occasionally used for clothing by the less socially sensetive, and there is a particularly disreputable tavern (and this is Ankh-Morpork we're talking about) which is not only called the Troll's Head but has a very old one on a pole over the door. On the other hand, trolls have been known to eat people (for their mineral content) and the troll game of aargrooha, in which a human head is kicked around by two teams wearing boots of obsidian until it either ends up in goal or bursts, it is almost certainly still played in its classical form in remote mountain regions.

So, mingling in the streets of the city are people whose recent ancestors variously ate, skinned, beheaded or in some cases jumped up and down in heavy boots on one another. That there is not a permanent state of all-out war is a tribute to the unifying force of the Ankh-Morpork dollar.

There are two legends about the founding of Ankh-Morpork.

One relates that the two orphaned brothers who built the city were in fact found and suckled by a hippopotamus (lit. orijeple, although some historians hold that this is a mistranslation of orejaple, a type of glass-fronted drinks cabinet). Eight heraldic hippos line the city's Brass Bridge, facing out to sea. It is said that if any danger ever threatens the city, they will run away. Nobody knows why the hippopotamus is the royal animal of Ankh-Morpork. The reasons are lost in the smogs of time. Rome had a she-wolf; on this basis, it is possible that the founders of Ankh-Morpork were suckled, or perhaps trodden on, by a hippo. But a hippo seems at least as legitimate as a slug, the city animal of Seattle, Washington. It has been speculated that hippos once inhabited the Ankh. If so, they have long since dissolved.

The other legend, recounted less frequently by citizens, is that at an even earlier time a group of wise men survived a flood sent by the gods by building a huge boat, and on this boat they took two of every type of animal then existing on the Disc. After some weeks the combined manure was beginning to weigh the boat low in the water, so - the story runs - they tipped it over the side, and called it Ankh-Morpork. (See also Civil War, Laws, Monarchy, Patrician.)

[1] Moretum, usually attributed to Virgil. Back

[2] A lot bigger, though. Troy covered only seven acres, but it did have Homer as director of tourism and publicity. Back

[3] i.e., better. Back