Chapter 1 Nisaba and the Identification of Sumerian Rhetoric

A dual mode of experience “underlies Sumerian religion” (Jacobson, 1994, p. 147). The Sumerians might “see the sky in one mode,” which appeared as the god An, “whose name is the everyday word for sky, ‘an’ ” (p. 147). The wind, from the high mountains “was similarly experienced as the god En-lil” (p. 147). In a secondary mode, the Sumerian gods were referential and interstitial to everyday experience. The gods were “the forces that ultimately caused and shaped” phenomenon (p. 149). In fact, Mesopotamian cultures deified the idea of cities and the cities themselves, as in the case of the god Assur (Lambert, 1975, p. 67). The Sumerians accounted for gods as causative natural forces. The inscriptive nomenclature, attributes, and provinces of purview of Nisaba, the goddess of writing, can tell us much about how Sumerians conceptualized abstract concepts, specifically what we call rhetoric. The textual artifacts that invoke Nisaba show that her association with writing did not suggest her patronage was to the act of graphic representation on surfaces. Rather, “writing” became a metaphor for a field of knowledge that acted with conceptual independence from individual human agency. Nisaba was the goddess of writing only because writing was an organizing and persuasive act to manifest understanding in others: in sum, rhetoric as idea. Thus, Nisaba was an interpolating nodal Page 26 →transmitter of knowledge and acted as an autonomous conceptual force that caused other effects. As an ontological identification of rhetoric, Nisaba metaphorically conveys and organizes knowledge; she therefore represented the means of understanding in relation to others through communicative acts. These narrative accounts are most extensively explored in both “The Building of Ninĝirsu’s Temple,” discussed in this chapter, and Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta (and related narratives), discussed in Chapter 2.

The use of artistic representations, epigraphical inscriptions, and other archaeological evidence to amplify the history of rhetoric; has been examined most extensively by Richard Leo Enos (2020, 1998, 2009, 2022), Amendola (2019), and Liddel (2021). Nisaba patronizes speech, writing, archival knowledge, and premeditated discursive design. She also represents the knowledge of the means to convey archival wisdom, which is her role in two major narratives from ancient Sumeria. These are all instrumental conceptual components of the Sumerian theory of rhetoric. While scholars such as Ong (1982) and Havelock (1986, 1982) have designated a somewhat privileged position for the origin of rhetoric and early theories of writing to Plato, these earlier theorists tend to focus exclusively on phonetic languages. Many peculiarities in the history of myth and rhetoric have been attributed to the early contributions of Nestle (1940) and their somewhat troubling and reductive presumptions (see Wians, 2019). Likewise, Goody (2010) only amplified this tendency by characterizing the transition from orality to literacy as “evolutionary,” suggesting that no higher orders of expression were possibly without phonetic writing systems. It is becoming demonstrably clearer as evidence is uncovered that cuneiform and hieroglyphic cultures were entirely capable of developing advanced technology and systematic scientific corpora of knowledge without phonetic conventions. The inscriptive evidence that exists in cuneiform illustrates the vital ontological implications of rhetoric prior to the Graeco-Roman period.

Mythic figures were analogical representations recorded to preserve and disseminate these concepts through their personifications and attendant narratives (Ramsey, 2021a). Havelock (1986), for example, noted the virtual “monopoly” of the muses’ conceptual influence in written Greek poetry (pp. 7–8). The gods, as anthropomorphic figures in ancient myth, often act liminally between fixed conceptual realms. Ancient mythic figures analogically articulate theoretical considerations of writing in their nature, properties, hallmarks, and the mythic narratives and roles they occupy. W. W. Hallo (2004) has written an early but extensive treatment in “The Birth of Rhetoric” in Sumerian literature and argued that the style of many Sumerian literary compositions Page 27 →reflect many consistent rhetorical strategies and genres, suggesting that these prefigured Graeco-Roman rhetoric (p. 169). The conceptual figures of the goddess Nisaba and the goddess Seshat in Egypt were similarly influential as causative agents and metaphorical expressions of the nature of rhetoric in their respective cultures.

Nisaba (or in older Sumerological translations, Nidaba) of Eresh is often described by Sumerologists as a goddess of grain and fertility akin to Ceres in Graeco-Roman myth. However, she is also known as the “lady of the reeds,” and her epithet immediately suggests her relationship to the primary writing tool of ancient Sumeria. Literacy and writing began in Sumeria as a pivotal factor in maintaining the sustenance and survival of their civilization. Measuring and apportionment, building granaries, keeping count of stores, and recording them were as vital to the continuance of Sumerian life as the grain they cultivated (see generally, Bottero, 1995; Hornung, 1982; Schmandt-Besserat, 1998, 1992). For whatever reason, Nisaba became more closely associated with archival knowledge, writing, measurement, and (ultimately) human destiny. Nisaba often bestows gifts associated with generative reasoning on humans. She likewise possesses the power to consult all knowledge in the Tablets of Destiny. Her name is used in a conventionalized praise invocation at the conclusion of scribal hymns and writing exercises, and she has stewardship of the knowledge of all things from her lapis tablet.

Nisaba’s relationship to archival knowledge requires some explanation regarding the locus of archival knowledge in the Sumerian cultural imaginal. In Sumeria, writing belonged to the gods both physically and conceptually. The stars were a kind of writing, and they foretold the destinies of humankind, into which humans had imperfect insight. Still, the gods possessed total foreknowledge and were therefore in control of the Tablets of Destiny (Furlani, 1928). The Tablet of Destiny, at least in later Babylonian culture, was held by Nabu, who seemed to succeed Nisaba in her role as scribal patron. As George (1986) explained, Nabu held the Tablet of Destiny “because as the divine patron of the scribal arts his temples often house libraries and schools” (p. 141). But in Mesopotamian culture more generally, “the tablet of destinies symbolized ownership of power over the universe” and was a prominent symbol of this authority” and “was displayed on the body as a symbol of the power it conferred” (Wisnom, 2020, p. 48). Rather than a geographically identifiable repository, the Page 28 →repository was located with the organized matrix of stars controlled by Nisaba, as a cosmic counterpart of the writing of stars themselves. Nisaba’s position is therefore in the heavens if she casts her wisdom down from them. To enter her house is therefore metaphorically astrological in nature, to consult her wisdom on a blue tablet of stars from which her wisdom derives: in sum, her archival position is celestial in nature.

Our first, explicit evidence of this is Enuma Anu Enlil, dating from the Neo-Assyrian period, “the comprehensive celestial omen series on the basis of which educated royal advisers counseled their kings” (Rochberg, 2004, p. 220). Because Nisaba has dominion over the contents of the celestial omen “book” that is the archive of all past and future events, the power to theurgically speak to change the future is hers, and the power to consult all past knowledge is hers as well. The Enuma Anu Enlil contains signs that implicate rhetorical matters (Hunger & Pingree, 1999; Reiner & Pingree, 1985), which in nature includes signs implicating harvest, war, natural disasters, and the like (Parpola, 1993; Ulanowski, 2020). In the Sumerian worldview, these astronomical texts were fixed but could be written again or revised by the divinities reflecting “a presumed connection between natural phenomena and the actions and influences of deities within a contingent universe”; divine powers could alter portents with human participation through a form of theurgy (Rochberg, 2004, p. 46). Both the knowledge of the signs and their correlations arguably derive from Nisaba’s mythic House of Wisdom, as does the knowledge of causal relationships past, present, and future.

Nisaba might personify a concept like rhetoric derived from an anthropomorphic worldview of human nature and real objects: by way of example, the Sumerian conception of anatomy associated each part of the human body with a zodiacal counterpart (Zee, 2015, p. 46). The Sumerians anthropomorphized their deities, and in turn, those deities anthropomorphically represented conceptual structures by metaphorical analogy (p. 47). Analogical relationships reflected the metonymical relationship of both objects and concepts to a higher anthropomorphic structure of reality. Glassner (2003) identified this anthropomorphic impulse as a desire to uncover the semantic richness of concepts and things through the world of divine personification. Nisaba, therefore, could indeed “be” rhetoric, as a composite of all the processes and attributes for which she is accountable. Such a metaphorical expression was an extended form of Page 29 →analogy or a fourth type metaphor that was rife in Sumerian expression. Rochberg (1996) has identified the Sumerian propensity to use anthropomorphic metaphors for celestial bodies. These bodies might also be onomastically associated with specific divinities (p. 476). This designation identified Nisaba and the synthesis of her attributes with the knowledge of a discrete art and concept that possessed its own technology: writing. As Rochberg explained, Sumerian identification with divine and anthropomorphic deities had social and intellectual ramifications. These identifications were ontological and were therefore a sophisticated composite reference to one divinity as a concept and a social act. Discussing this in the context of celestial omens, Rochberg (2004) has explained that “this is consistent with evidence from incantations that describe the gods as ‘the ones who determine the nature of things, who draw the cosmic designs, who assign the lots for heaven and earth’ ” (musimmu simtti mussiru usurdti mussiqu isqeti sa same u ersetim; p. 191).

That Nisaba could personify and anthropomorphize a concept as sophisticated as rhetorical activity to the Sumerians would be no more controversial than a contemporary observation that the sun makes things warm. By drawing the cosmic design and designating real knowledge, Nisaba’s seemingly superficial patronage of writing becomes complex. The idea of writing was a composite image of her participation in the conceptual act of writing itself, a term used synonymously with speaking in the lexical expression of the Sumerians. We must therefore inquire about the precise nature of these attributes to understand the Sumerian conception of rhetoric. Rochberg has decisively shown that the metaphorically analogical and anthropomorphic expression of the Sumerians embraced conceptual analogies to the persons of their deities.

Somewhat dated descriptions of Sumerian approaches to abstract expression characterized their thinking as “mythopoetic,” a descriptor that implies they dissolved categorical thinking and ultimately characterized them as primitive or nonrational. To Rochberg (1996), analogical reasoning remains “a useful indication of how the Babylonians thought” (p. 478). Glassner (2012) has argued that Nisaba did not write but rather functioned as a kind of “surveyor” in the context of celestial omens (p. 58). Whether her role was surveyor, archivist, or scribe, for example, in the Sumerian analogical mode of expression, Nisaba’s role was significantly more nuanced than merely having charge of writing. Her role was far more complex and consistently related to planning, designation, organization, language, and wisdom. Yet in all of these roles, there is a notable connection to what later cultures would taxonomize as rhetoric. To refer to Nisaba’s composite synthesis of traits associated with writing as an act, which is Page 30 →often amplified by her depiction as in possession of a pen and starry tablet, may in any case be a grave oversimplification. In some myths, as we shall see, her association with architecture is manifest, but in this context, she has a technical assistant in the form of another divinity. These actions all share in the intelligent construction and design of artifacts, whether writing, building, planning, or organizing, which is central to the Sumerian conception of rhetoric.

The Sumerian fascination with signs in writing was a central preoccupation of their culture and cultural identity. Their preoccupation is reflected in their hermeneutic—and metaphysical—view of the relationship of stellar signs, futurity, and divination. Rochberg (2004) has offered a flexible and general definition of divination in antiquity as the “prognostication of events through signs discerned in all sorts of phenomena of the natural and human social world” and noted its ubiquitous presence in the Mediterranean world and Near East long before Graeco-Roman antiquity (p. 44). To paraphrase Glassner (2012), in the beginning, the Sumerian deities filled the world and the heavens with both things and written signs (p. 43). The “cosmological discourse” imposed on the worldview of the Sumerians was an assumption of the existence of an invisible domain, peopled by gods that were originary forces and causal agents governing the perceived regularities of the cosmos (p. 43). Signs that came from the gods functioned metonymically, revealing occult information to initiates. Their cosmology and the interpolation of signs throughout it created “a subtle dialectic of the visible and of the invisible, of presence and absence” in the Sumerians as observers and interpreters of cosmic writing (p. 44).¹

Glassner (2009) attributed this tenuous dialectical relationship between signs and futurity, too, to a parallel hermeneutic tension between belief and observation. The knowledge and directives of the invisible world, therefore, became comprehensible from signs in the visible world, the “heavenly writing” over which Nisaba had unlimited consultative access and distributive authority. Glassner explained that the signs were received dually, on the one hand, designated by divine authority, which made concepts into discrete relevant units, and on the other a Sumerian interpreter who connected these units to human activities (p. 45). The divine nature of Nisaba, then, was an identification of rhetoric as a synthesis of two realms: archival knowledge that derived from an infinite reservoir of permanent but dynamic archives like the stars themselves. The combination of the two realms related to spheres of human activity associated with speech and writing or purposeful design more generally. The ability to use the signs of cosmically archival knowledge and to plan discursive and creative activity was one aspect of her identification with rhetoric; Page 31 →writing was a symbolically analogical attribute of her nature. The interpretive act, therefore, became generative knowledge “through identification and designation,” which then empowered the Sumerians to create new knowledge by reason and explication (p. 45).

The Sumerians therefore extrapolated from the presence of signs to argue for actions that most properly befitted the nature of events of macrocosmic significance. Such an extrapolation is a reversal of typical argumentative forms associated with topics in the future. Many ancient cultures contextually interpreted patterns of discrete phenomena with reference to broad categories of discrete divinatory signs. Therefore, one’s personal and political behavior could conform to right action to anticipate and navigate the changing natural operations of the universe. The commonality of belief in forms of ancient divination as topoi of speech in the ancient world posited the relationship of signs to a unified totality of circumstances. Signs functioned as a symbolic form of a whole: a metonymic function. These signs were not hierarchical in their relationship to the physis of the cosmos. Rather, signs had analogical significance: a sign was as much a part of a functional system as a human participant in the system and not merely a product in a chain of causal events that produced the sign. Divinatory practices across the transcultural ancient world likewise reflect an awareness of the relationship of past knowledge, present dilemmas, and future consequences. One divinatory cuneiform source gives us retrospective insight into this view; it states: “the signs on earth as well as of the sky bear signals for us; heaven and earth bring us omens; they are not separate from one another; heaven and earth are interconnected” (see Oppenheim, 1974, p. 200). The Sumerian cosmic worldview thus laid the foundation of the interpretation of cosmic signs, the “archive” of Nisaba, and connected those signs to future planning. That human speech and writing would be a necessary, systemic, and coordinating part of prospective planning seems a logical conclusion: a form of ontological identification of this knowledge developed from the Sumerian cosmological perspective that was expressed as a mythic analogy. This is the starting point for an illustration of the starry tablet and the stylus of Nisaba, as well as her general properties.

Mythic sources show an even earlier belief in the capacity for timely civic action in the face of unknowable future events if they properly align with the Page 32 →ordered universe. In many of these, written signs and symbols are formative in the acts of kings and heroes and owe to the manifestation of symbols from divine origins. Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, discussed extensively in Chapter 2, describes the astrological functions of the gods, and human relationships to them, when attempting to resolve civic arguments. During an argument with the Lord of Aratta, Enmerkar prays to the goddess Nisaba for assistance; she opens “the house of wisdom” to him and eventually masters the art of writing (see Figure 1). Arguably, the original employment of writing for civic ends resolved a famine decimating Aratta and a conflict between cities. The mythic sequence of events implies causality between Enmerkar’s formulation of responses to his argument and a consultative relationship with the natural and divinely ordered cosmos. It also demonstrates the nodal causality inherent in the Sumerian view of writing: Enemerkar consults the goddess who, through her fundamentally causative role, assists the human network in giving events coherence and meaning. In fact, Nisaba is praised at the end of multiple Enmerkar epics, one of which reads, “Praise be to Nisaba, good woman who consults the stars of heaven!” (Nisaba Hymn A). In another description of Nisaba, one Sumerian wrote that Nisaba “Continually … consults the lapis lazuli tablet, continually she shouts to the mountains, the good woman, holy Iye plant, borne by a growing reed, measures off heaven, throws the measuring cord to earth!” (Alster, 1976, p. 114). This passage bears some philological attention to the nature of writing in Sumeria and the nature of tablets themselves. The Sumerian term gu-sum (and its Akkadian equivalent, mihiltum) was generalized as “orthocalligraphy” from a term more akin to a “single stroke of the cuneiform wedge” (Vanstiphout, 1988, p. 153). This is distinct from a separate form of writing known as tuparuttu or “the art of writing.” At least in its Akkadian variant, mihiltum (and by inference, gu-sum) seems to have embraced a desire to express homology to sound and form as well as novel embellishment (p. 158). That “tablet” (s. dub) could be used interchangeably for writing, science, literature, and culture is evidence that Nisaba’s role as patroness of writing was far more complex than the making of strokes on clay surfaces (p. 158). Rather, Nisaba possessed the image of knowledge in visible form and held the key to its creation, the knowledge of the means to write.

The communicative relationship between Mesopotamian peoples and their cosmological environment strongly suggests that they needed a rhetoric ontologically different from other cultures. The phrase in Sumerian “a thing of (heavenly) stars” could denote synonymously “message,” “report,” and the like (Klein & Sefati, 2014, p. 90). Nisaba therefore controls all knowledge in the “House of Wisdom” whose locus is stellar and connects writing—which the Sumerians likened to the stars in the night sky “written” by the Gods—and her dominion over the lapis tablet, or Tablets of Destiny. Nisaba was steward of the knowledge of both writing and human destiny (Meador, 2011). She was said to have received and arranged the letters of the cuneiform characters just as she arranged the stars in the night sky. To the ancient Sumerians, stars were a form of celestial writing; if one could “read” this divine writing by the auspices and omens of the world around us, the future itself could be known (Rochberg, 2004). Nisaba’s function is that of “a determiner of cosmic dimensions” (Alster, 1976, p. 112). References to Nisaba have stated, in a variety of sources listed by Klein and Sefati, “from the tablet of writing of the holy heavens [Nisaba] takes counsel” and that she “covers the great tablets of destiny with writing” (p. 115). She is depicted “taking counsel with the holy tablet of heavenly stars” (p. 115). Nisaba consults this lapis lazuli tablet, which Alster suggested is a symbol of the heavens, to determine human fate (p. 112).

Page 33 →

Page 34 →Nisaba’s causative nature is evident in her role in organizing written Sumerian characters. In the mythic rhetorical schema of the Sumerians, she is the goddess of the conceptual “net”—the connective and organizing principle for which she bears responsibility. Nisaba gathers the symbols together for the gods to create meaning. In relation to stories of the gods, certain invocations (āšipu) of Nisaba may derive from ritual practices, which the Sumerians employed to gain favor or remedy disfavor from the gods (Meador, 2011, p. 73). In one such āšipu the invoker beseeches Nisaba to “net against” angry supernatural forces (p. 71). This example of Nisaba’s association with the “net” as binding not only humans and gods but humans to one another in a social fabric is an example of her relational ontology. Another example: Nisaba did not create the discrete symbols of the Sumerian writing system, but she is said to have “netted” together these symbols. According to a very early version of the “Kesh Hymn” discovered at Abu Sulabik, Nisaba created written language by capturing the words of a hymn by the chief god, Enlil (p. 3). In so doing, she then placed the words on a tablet she held, establishing a “standard” lexicon. “She spun, as it were, a web/of those words” laying them “ready to hand” for the human world (p. 4). This image of nets and netting (particularly of birds) in the context of rhetoric recurs in Egyptian rhetorical myth and even in Plato’s dialogues.

Nisaba is, therefore, the net maker; that is, the primal force that gathers the symbols together. To the Sumerians, Nisaba personified rhetorical processes in her role as a symbol organizer, assembling these symbols into meaning. The symbol of the net recurs continually across eras and cultures in rhetorical myth. The interconnected warp and weft of the net is used to capture and organize fugitive conceptual “animals” and is thus another metaphorical analogy. The concept of netting illustrates the Sumerian idea of rhetoric and its relational pattern of interconnectedness to other things. Nisaba is one of the oldest rhetorical patrons and progenitors not only because she personifies the organization of language, which is her popular attribution; she orders and arranges Page 35 →language to mediate between the human and divine world (Ramsey, 2021b). The image of the “net” represents Nisaba’s intercessional rhetorical power to the Sumerians embodied in language itself. The Sumerians analogically posited that Nisaba made meaning for the gods and was the first recorded mythic figure overtly described as such. Nisaba’s possession of the stellar tablet is the source of the archival aspect of her power; it is from this same repository that she governs human futurity in a preceptive manner. Glassner (2012) stated that in the “Hymn of Gudea,” Nisaba initially writes a “plan” for construction in a separate, stellar language, which in turn must be translated into cuneiform (p. 199). Nisaba likewise had an intimate relationship with futurity and opportunity; she was responsible for creating human destiny, but she also was intimately responsible for the future of humanity itself. In the Sumerian worldview, writing was the causative node from which the future itself might emerge.

The “Hymn to King Isbi-Erra of Isin” from the third millennium reflects the way the Sumerians perceived the civilizing and life-sustaining force of language in organized patterns. The Sumerian worldview foreshadows later Graeco-Roman rhetorical traditions in the expression of logos, but for very different theological reasons. The hymn states that wherever Nisaba approaches, “There is writing!” (Reisman, 1976, p. 359). Nisaba is characterized as the figurative “place” where writing has a substantive being: Nisaba approaches an earthly location and causes writing to appear. Where Nisaba does not exist, the hymn explains, “humanity is not established,” and “cities are not built, and rites to the gods are not performed” (p. 359). “Kings are not raised” without Nisaba, and thus there is no basis of government. The hymn implies that on the opposite end of this spectrum, Nisaba provides the knowledge of all these things; it is because of Nisaba’s organizational and archival capacities that grain is present and “milk is churned” (p. 359).

Yet nowhere in this excerpt is Nisaba said to be truly anywhere, suggesting her power is liminal and associated with causation alone. She establishes the rites that permit human existence in the spaces between wilderness and civilization, underscoring her role in future planning. In this context, it should be recalled that Nisaba was not the goddess of knowledge but the keeper of the house of knowledge. She opened the way to knowledge; she possessed the knowledge of the means to wisdom, the means to arrive at a prospective plan, not wisdom itself. Her stewardship and gatekeeping of the archival past and the means of prospective future design—through rhetorical activity—are distinct. Her role strongly suggests that her knowledge was of the means of persuasion Page 36 →and invention, including rhetorical knowledge. A hallmark of her knowledge of the means of invention is her association with a stylus and tablet.

There are other suggestions in temple hymns related to Nisaba’s role in the intellectual world of ancient Mesopotamia, specifically the Sumerian conception of the future planning of society. Her role reflects her conceptual status as an organizing principle in the human social order or a node of causation providing order to the network of humanity. Like her role as a liminal agent between past and future knowledge, the image of Nisaba and the thread of human society reflects that this was a quality inherent in the Mesopotamian concept of rhetoric itself (see generally Van Gennep, 2019; Turner, 1986, 2018). The Hymn to Nanshe (2000) states: “Her chief scribe Nisaba places the precious tablets on her knees and takes a golden stylus in her hand. She arranges the servants in single file.” Thus, the conjunction of the tools of writing and order is implicit in the grammatical sense of the lines. The writer praises Nisaba: “You string together men and women on a single thread—their daily status hangs down before your eyes. Your numerous people parade before your eyes, as (before) the Sun, for their inspection.” Nisaba “writes” humans into order across time—as the sun travels across time and space—along a golden thread which demonstrates that her rhetorical power is connected to time; rhetoric has a social, organizing capacity embodied in the figure of Nisaba. Nisaba’s power is, in part, organizational: she organizes the knowledge of human relationships, not society itself, in this Sumerian metaphor.

In “The Building of Ninĝirsu’s Temple” (1999), the plan of the temple is revealed from Nisaba’s the House of Wisdom. Nisaba offers Gudea the initial sign of a building to construct. It does not appear with knowledge of an architectural plan, but as the liminal figure of Nisaba between the protagonist, Gudea, and the means of knowing those plans. In this narrative, Nisaba’s function is therefore epistemic. Her nature was apprehensible in the mediating position between the design of the temple and Gudea’s mind. Nisaba controls the knowledge of the means of understanding reasoned design, while Enki provides the design itself. The starry house and tablet of Nisaba is the inflection point from which knowledge comes and future action originates; a nodal and causative connection between archival wisdom and planned discourse occurs only through Nisaba. Thus, in “The Building of Ninĝirsu’s Temple,” Nisaba appears to Gudea in a dream, holding a metal stylus and a tablet. A soothsayer then interprets the stylus as a sign of the “opening” of the House of Wisdom. It is in this house that Gudea is instructed to build a temple to Ningirsu (Figure 2). “The Building of Ninĝirsu’s Temple” illustrates Nisaba-as-concept; Nisaba functions as an ontological identification of rhetoric revealed, at first, in a dream. Gudea recounts his dream: “Then there was a woman whoever she was. She let sheaves protrude out from her head. She held a stylus of refined silver in her hand, placed a tablet with heavenly writing on her lap, and was consulting it.”

Page 37 →

Nisaba typically appears with the tablet and stylus in hand; this functions as a metaphorical gesture to her relationship to the graphic depiction of reasoned structural planning and, just as significantly, writing as a means to understanding. Her presence immediately suggests that the dream’s central meaning is to elicit a process of reasoned invention through signs. Nisaba appears in the company of Ninduba, a technical god responsible for construction. Nisaba both plans and conveys the knowledge of planning, while Ninduba is the god who affects those plans in detail. In this context, Nisaba’s relationship to architecture is akin to her relationship to language as an embodiment of rhetoric; she controls the available means of understanding, not the information itself. Page 38 →Nisaba-as-concept represents the human capacity to impose order on signs from the world and the means to convey the formal knowledge of that order. The metaphor for her ability to organize and express knowledge is represented symbolically by the appearance of Nisaba and her writing tools. The writing Nisaba is responsible for might be on the world itself or on the tabula rasa of human consciousness. In this sense, Nisaba is the goddess of reasoned consideration in advance of creative acts, particularly those involving language or the deployment of graphic signs.

Gudea is then informed that Nisaba is the goddess who “will tell you the holy instructions for the temple’s building” (1999, Cylinder A ix 15), but Ninduba will ensure those directions are followed. After Gudea’s mediated revelation from Nisaba-as-sign, he assembles his materials; in this process, “He resolved all quarrels and dealt with the complaints: he cleared away the venom of (angry) mouths” (Cylinder A ix 12). Praying to Ninĝirsu, the god for whom he builds the temple, Gudea asks for guidance; Ninĝirsu promises to give the sign of heavenly stars to guide Gudea as if by means of his voice (gu; Cylinder A ix 9–10). After Gudea assembles the materials tirelessly and ritually presents them to his god, “Nisaba opened the house of understanding and Enki put right the design of the temple” (Cylinder A xvii 14–16). As a rhetorical goddess, Nisaba first reveals the existence of a plan, spurring Gudea to action. Thereafter, she conveys the plan to Gudea. The authorship of the plan was not hers; she therefore represents a distinct form of knowledge that is the means of understanding and, in turn, making known to others as a distinct form of knowledge. By implication, she represents the ontological relationship of rhetoric to the world. Gudea, after his admission to the House of Wisdom, fully apprehends the knowledge of the plan—though not the methods—to construct the temple, “as if he himself were Nisaba knowing the inmost secrets of numbers” (Cylinder A xix 19–21). Nisaba-as-concept knows and conveys; humans, in turn, act. Averbeck (1997) explained that Gudea’s completion is a perfection of the temple’s me: a fashioning of the form of the place to its proper function (p. 83). Nisaba, however, provides Gudea with the knowledge of form. Through Gudea, Nisaba conveys the knowledge of rhetoric to an application of another field of conceptual knowledge.

Not only does Nisaba control the knowledge of planning, but she also conveys the plan for action in the face of contingent futurity. In a sense, Gudea’s mind becomes one with that of the goddess, standing on the nexus of past archival information and reasoned future planning. Nisaba does not write the plan, nor does Gudea write it; he comprehends and acts on the knowledge Page 39 →given to him by Nisaba. There is thus an epistemic component to her power. The sign and the rhetorical force of Nisaba herself induces understanding in Gudea. The myth explains: “The intention of his master had become clear for him, the words of Ninĝirsu had become as conspicuous as a banner to Gudea” (Cylinder A xix 25–26). Gudea understands the sign’s intent and the plan itself while Nisaba acts as a mediating rhetorical force. She is therefore an analogy for the power of planning intimately related to signs, discourse, and prospective design. Nisaba provides the means to comprehend that knowledge; she opens “the house of understanding” through signs. Nisaba is the mediating figure that possesses the means to make knowledge organized and communicable and is thereby a rhetorical exemplar.

Nisaba is characterized as a goddess who possesses the innate knowledge of communication and organization of knowledge at a categorically higher cognitive level than humanity. Nisaba transmitted this knowledge by providing an understanding of revealed signs, but not the signs themselves. In Gudea’s initial dream, Nisaba is an essential causal link in Gudea’s eventual complete comprehension of the prospective design laid out for the temple. In other words, Nisaba embodies the knowledge and means of persuasion to make the will of the gods manifest, as well as the ability of humans to make cautious prospective designs for the future. Arguably, the temple that Gudea (Figure 3) designs might not be physical but metaphorical, although the myth certainly refers to a physical temple (see Averbeck, 1997). The temple might also be a metaphor calculated to convey a lesson concerning human understanding of any technical art conveyed by Nisaba, including rhetoric. At a minimum, Nisaba’s involvement illustrates her roles in ancient Sumeria’s creative and deliberate inventive processes. Nisaba’s function extends to conscientious linguistic design to promote understanding: the myth thereby illustrates that Nisaba is the knowledge of the means to convey understanding, while Ninĝirsu acts as the sign-maker who reveals the existence of the designs of Enki to Gudea.

When Nisaba briefly appears in “The Building of Ninĝirsu’s Temple,” her depiction sufficiently summarizes the connection between rhetoric as a union of archival knowledge and prospective design. We know this by the hallmarks that accompany her: the stylus and tablet. The stylus and tablet are connected to archival knowledge and generative discursive futurity in the form of stellar symbols. In Gudea’s dream, the writing of the future rests on Nisaba’s tablet in the form of “heavenly stars”; Nisaba holds a stylus over the starry tablet, showing her (rhetorical) means of control over the future (1963, p. 134; Kramer, 1968, 1969). Rhetorical technology, the reed stylus and tablet, were persistent and central objects in Sumerian rhetorical practices, and they equally persist in accompanying Nisaba’s appearance in mythic accounts. Although her plans are architectural in the account of Gudea, they symbolize a form of prospective written action and are metaphorical for rhetorical power. However, architecture was not merely a metaphorical form of written rhetoric to the Sumerians and can be illustrated by reference to the actual bricks and construction fragments excavated from the ruin of the Temple of Ningirsu. The fragments in Figure 4 are housed at the Muzeum Narodowe Warszawa as part of their general exhibition of Sumerian artifacts. The items constitute a brick fragment and architectural cones originating from the sites of the Temple of Ningirsu, as well as cone-shaped architectural artifacts inscribed by Gudea from the ruins of the Temple of Messiamtaea. Both temples were located in Girsu and illustrate that elements of the temple itself were covered in writing. Sumerian architectural presence was rhetorical and not merely as an implication of its visual or monumental nature. Certain structures were essentially made of writing, specifically cuneiform writing. In fact, writing on the foundation or border stones of kingdoms in the Near East, and as far north as the Caucasus region, were common for both commemorative and cultural reasons. The foundation stones of the (much later) city of contemporary Yerevan are covered with extensive cuneiform inscriptions (Figure 5). The Armenian connection to Sumeria may, indeed, be as old as the city of Aratta, mentioned in the Enmerkar epics.

Page 40 →

Page 41 →In Gudea’s dream, Nisaba does not “command” Gudea to build a temple. Nisaba’s presence, not her direct command, motivates Gudea to understand Nisaba-as-sign. From the interpretation of Nisaba-as-sign, Gudea Creates prospective plans to construct an elaborate temple. Gudea’s dream itself requires an understanding of signs that Sumerians regarded as both archival and cosmic. The signs are connected to meaning by an interpreter of dreams. After the hermeneutic act of the dream interpreter, a prospective and creative endeavor can begin, subject to cautious and reasoned design. Nisaba-as-sign thereby becomes a causative agent of nodal transmission, which is fundamentally inventive. Once this archival knowledge is subjected to human interpretation, it can become prospective action. It is only through the goddess-as-sign that a nodal transmission of knowledge occurs.

Page 42 →

The construction of the temple of Ninĝirsu itself may well be an extended analogical metaphor on multiple levels. Averbeck (2004) has shown that it is primarily a memorial to the building of an actual temple. Arguably, such a narrative had no other purpose; beyond its purely historical telos, it offers analogical lessons that inform our understanding of the nature of rhetoric in Sumeria. As Averbeck pointed out, in Sumerian myths patterns often create “a set of analogical relationships between these gods and the realities of man’s world” (p. 335). In the case of Nisaba, we see an evident pattern of her function as a Page 43 →rhetorical concept, however, applied to architecture. “The Building of Ninĝirsu’s Temple” might have been offered on a secondary level as epideictic praise for the best qualities of Gudea as a cultural hero, thereby presenting Gudea as a practical and moral exemplar. The cylinders upon which “The Building of Ninĝirsu’s Temple” appears are of such detail and size as to suggest that the narrative may have represented a storehouse of cultural metaphors of all the above whose importance transcended historicizing a place or structure. Often, however, analogical metaphors are connected to qualities intrinsic to Sumerian culture, such that as historical and cultural outsiders, we may be unable to complete the inferences necessary to fully understand the metaphors in the text. This would be particularly true in a culture that we can only survey in fragmentary and dispersed form; our attempts at a granular reconstruction of their myths may devolve rapidly into speculation.

The details of Nisaba’s role in “The Building of Ninĝirsu’s Temple” indicates the existence of a connection between the rhetorical act, the epistemic power of Nisaba, and its association with archival knowledge and prospective design. These composite qualities are part of the ontological identification of Sumerian rhetoric. Nisaba’s appearance strongly suggests that she functioned as an anthropomorphized goddess-as-sign; this sign was an identification of rhetorical principles. In a contextual comparison of many other global rhetorical myths, “The Building of Ninĝirsu’s Temple” exemplifies one with a common mytheme: the liminal dream inspiration. In myths across varied times and cultures, liminal “dream messengers” act epistemically to reveal ideas to humans. Rhetorical myths commonly involve a creative act that is inspired or otherwise conveyed through a nonhuman entia with a liminal function. These entia function epistemically to bridge two worlds and deliver rhetorical knowledge from one to the other. Nisaba is a rhetorical goddess who acts as an anthropomorphic analogy of rhetoric and as a liminal messenger.

The evidence of Nisaba’s role elsewhere recurs in the Sumerian textual record. In the cuneiform inscription generally known as the Shulgi B hymn, a king describes his personal qualities that befit his political position: the ability to write quickly and the ability to clearly communicate with people of many different cultures in their own language (Praise poem of Shulgi [Shulgi B], 2000). According to Emelianov (2004), Shulgi attributes his competencies in communication directly to Nisaba because “the goddess Nisaba herself, who patronized the literacy and the school, had given Shulgi the qualities owing to which these skills were received: they are called ‘attention’ (geštu2) and ‘comprehension’ (gizzal). Both words are written with the use of a sign meaning Page 44 →‘an ear’ ” (p. 184). To Shulgi, these qualities made him a man “with ‘a shining heart’ (šag-zalag) of intuition and bright eyes seeing the sphere of gods’ secrets” (2004: 186). Further evidence of a similar role is overtly described in “A Praise Poem of Lipit-Eshtar (Lipit-Eshtar B)” (2000), which recounts “Nisaba … the lady who knows everything, guides your fingers on the clay: she makes them put beautiful wedges on the tablets and adorns them with a golden stylus. Nisaba generously bestowed upon you the measuring rod.” Nisaba is said to even move the fingers of persons in the writing process and the instrument of measured design, that is, the means of writing itself. Thus, listening, speaking, and writing skills are attributed to Nisaba. To Shulgi, such skills made him not only an effective diplomat and administrator but also a person who possessed insight into the minds of the gods themselves. Shulgi claims that these rhetorical skills make him effectively prescient of likely future events, thereby giving him preternatural practical insights. The ability to see and listen and the ability to speak all have as their causal pivot the action of the goddess Nisaba, who opens the House of Wisdom to Shulgi, which is but one suggestion of the mediating rhetorical role of Nisaba.

The House of Wisdom, and ingress to it, was a metaphor for rhetoric’s developmental power and its liminal relations between worlds, humans, and ideas. The interpolation of Nisaba’s will, not self-mastery or learned skill, permits Shulgi access to the art of comprehension; his reflection permits us a narrow insight into the theological implications of Niaba’s presence in relation to the learning and mastery of rhetoric. Nisaba’s intermediate position in Shulgi B between human and divine, astral and earthly, and conceptual and practical worlds is likewise evident. In still another Shulgi poem, Klein (1981) translated Shulgi’s boast: “To that end, I made the ‘Wisdom-House-of-Nisaba’ resplendent with generous gifts … like the heavenly stars, (So that) nothing (of these hymns) will ever pass from memory” and he commands “May the singer conduct the scribe … Read them out for him, like from a lapis-lazuli tablet! May he make my songs shine forth like silver in its ore!” (p. 20).

In Glassner’s (2009) view, the Sumerians believed there to be a distinction between the celestial omen and the human sign and sought through divinatory writing to analogically reconcile the two. By reconciling signs and omens, the world of the gods became coexistent and coincident with the human world. Nisaba empowers humans through access to unlimited knowledge, including the means of persuasion and technology to support it, with her gifts that emit from a stellar House of Wisdom; this is the causative nodal transmission point to distribute cognitive apprehension in a network of actors. As a result, Page 45 →characters in Sumerian mythological narratives achieve both understanding and rhetorical power. The nexus of this divinatory reconciliation suggests that past writing might form omens and predictions aimed at futurity. The substance of writing was the relationship between the archival past and the perceptual design of human fate in the future. But Nisaba’s knowledge was not of things themselves but of the means to know things: she possessed the means to enter the archival past and the means to record new inventions through the art of writing. The anthropomorphic expression was thus metaphorical in her person, and this knowledge of the means to recall and invent through discursive action was the earliest identification of rhetoric as a discrete field of knowledge. This anthropomorphic expression was ontological because, as Karlyn Kohrs Campbell (1970) explained, Nisaba represented an anthropomorphic metaphor “which indicated symbolic behavior” and empowered humans to design new forms wherein “the individual creates his meaning through detecting, identifying, and interpreting” signs to integrate his knowledge to new forms to socially interact with their culture and other humans (p. 104). From earliest times, figurative emblems in clay or stone could represent concepts in Sumerian ontology (Schmandt-Besserat, 2007, p. 171). For example, a figurine depicting two entwined figures could represent a metaphor of creation, representing the embrace of An and Ki (p. 171). Nisaba conveyed an ontological principle that formed an anthropomorphized identification of rhetoric. It remains to be seen how that definition was implicitly one akin to rhetoric as the West would come to understand it.

Nisaba was an early metaphorical description of some conceptual force. The discrete characteristics of this knowledge Nisaba has the power to convey include access to an archival form of knowledge (characterized as wisdom) and reasoned perceptual design applied to discourse. Consider contrastive subsequent definitions of rhetoric with that of the Sumerians, who metaphorically conveyed their awareness of a discrete field of ontic knowledge through Nisaba’s personification. Sumerian rhetoric had marked systemic similarities to other ontic recognitions of rhetoric in antiquity. Citing Sumeria, Glassner (2003) has largely discredited the early theories that arguably began with “the Greek miracle” of Renan (pp. 50–52) and equally disregarded exceptionalist thinking applied to Sumeria as an approach to comparativism. “Comparativism” to Page 46 →Glassner is not “a typology of societies hierarchically arranged on an evolutionary scale,” but “the network of relations that make cultures exist and the context in which they evolve” (p. 8). Adopting Glassner’s position by reference, consider a conceptual comparison to subsequent definitional explanations of rhetoric.

Consider Aristotle’s (2006) well-worn definition of rhetoric and its prevalence in contemporary notions of ancient rhetoric as the knowledge of all available means of persuasion. Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric was largely lost or neglected throughout the history of Western thought for at least 1,300 years. Upon its reintroduction, it was not broadly adopted. Today, however, Aristotle’s definition is cited so reflexively as to constitute a dictionary definition that is nearly meaningless. The Aristotelian definition of rhetoric recognized that rhetoric is defined by its interrelationships with other things. Aristotle described rhetoric as “the antistrophos of dialectic” (Rhetoric, I:1), whose inherent relational ambiguity has been explored by McAdon (2001). However, and somewhat paradoxically, Aristotle regarded rhetoric as an articulable field of human knowledge with distinct characteristics. Rhetoric was taxonomically identifiable and inherently divisible into relational subparts distinct from other things. Aristotle explains those ontological relationships in his definitions of judicial, deliberative, and epideictic human activity. It was, therefore, an ontological identification of the reality and being of a concept and its relationship to the life of collective human experience. The Sumerians, in the analogical expression of Nisaba, likewise identify rhetoric as composed of relational parts, namely archival wisdom (that analogically lives in a stellar “house”) and prospective deliberate design, particularly of language. Aristotle seems to privilege rational argumentative discourse above all other relations to substantive fields of knowledge to which rhetoric relates. On the other hand, the Sumerians extend no such privilege (see Chapter 2). Rather, they apply the ontic category of rhetoric to a broad range of human social situations, persuasive ends, and designs. Rhetoric is thereby framed as discrete fields of knowledge in dynamic interaction. The Sumerians, as illustrated above, conceived of rhetoric as the union of multiple elements in dynamic synthesis for multiple ends.

Likewise, consider the traditional canons of memoria, inventio, and dispositio. Nisaba arranges the characters as stars in her mythology; she controls the House of Wisdom, a characterization that represents a kind of higher order of memory if taken as a metaphorical intellectual faculty. Finally, she conveys knowledge of the principles of prospective reasoned design. If this description is not sufficiently rhetorical, then the Sumerian analogical anthropomorphism Page 47 →of Nisaba as the union of means to access the “House of Wisdom” and the knowledge of the means of reasoned prospective discursive production is sufficient, when compared to later, post-Ciceronian conceptions of rhetoric. This is somewhat analogous to Nisaba’s anthropomorphic analogical status as a representation of rhetoric. Recall that Cicero reflected (at least in his youthful work De Inventione, 1949) that true rhetoric did not seem possible except as the union of wisdom and eloquence. Cicero’s definition of eloquence had, by contrast to Aristotle’s definition, a nearly uninterrupted application by theorists throughout late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Renaissance.

The recordation of Nisaba as an ontological representation of rhetoric occurred at a very early date and represents an awareness of rhetoric that would be made more complex around 2100 bce in Enmerkar. The foregoing inscriptions date from periods where writing already had an alethic status of communication in Sumer. By this time, the Sumerians recorded many important transactions and cultural records in writing, including administrative, economic, theological, and diplomatic documents. Based on the extant inscriptive record, it is difficult to determine just how long the Sumerians had possessed or the point of development of Nisaba as a rhetorically conceptual figure. It is clear that by the time of the recordation of Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, writing had become an established and vital part of Sumerian life. The historical origins of rhetoric were thereby conveyed and remembered through myths in writing, and in them we find vital clues to Sumerian theories of rhetoric. In Chapter 2, we examine how the Sumerians further articulate rhetoric’s relational ontology to other fields of knowledge and human activity by 2100 bce.