Introduction

The historical development of rhetoric in the ancient world is often attributed to a transition from oral to literate social hierarchies in ancient Greece. But comparatively little has been written about the rhetoric of nearby cultures that experienced the transition millennia before 850–550 bce. The transition from orality to literacy in Greece is sometimes cited as a milestone in human Page 4 →cognitive development attributable to the importation of the Phoenician writing system (Gardiner, 1916, 1947). However, few have considered the precursors of the Phoenician alphabet, which were equally valid forms of symbolic expression. An equally significant connection to the history of rhetoric can be found in the appearance of formal configurations of myth that expressed rhetorical theory and precept in Sumer or the custom and usage of rhetorical myth in ancient Egypt that preceded Hellenic history. The appearance of rhetorical myth was equally evident as an immediate precedent to the oft-cited cultural transition from orality to literacy: myth is foundational evidence of how humans conceptualized and produced new symbolic forms and meanings.

If myth is closely examined in relation to rhetoric, as V. G. Turner (1986) suggested, “history will of course unpack its latent structure, especially as experience encounters traditional structures of culture and thought” (p. 293). This book represents the very tip of a preliminary interrogation of a vast corpus of material whose influence on the history of rhetoric is epistemically measurable in texts and likely immeasurable in the transmission of oral mythic traditions. Suppose one examines the nature and operation of these eldest expressions concerning human persuasion. In that case, we might uncover its underlying structure, particularly as we engage these culturally systemic and conceptual structures as a form of ontological mapping. This book concerns these mythic, conceptual maps that implicated rhetoric in the ancient world. It is a cartographical reading of these conceptual maps as a set of ontological relationships and geographies made visible. At some point around 2650 bce, these maps begin to include rhetoric as a discrete ontological object and express its relation to other concepts.

This initial foray into commonalities among myths will contextualize their role as expressions of rhetoric across three cultures. It offers examples of what I describe as “rhetorical myths” as conceptual shorthand. These rhetorical myths possess conceptual, cultural, and historical connections; their interconnectedness illustrates a continuum of mythic expression in the ancient world that often operated analogically. These myths conveyed culture-bound expressions of what would be designated rhêtorikê very late in this history. Rhetorical myths are distinct from other sets of myths because their primary goal was the didactic communication of precepts and considerations relating to the nature and use of language for purposeful ends. These considerations varied but were fundamentally rhetorical because they implicated the formation of discourse, either spoken or written. Moreover, rhetorical myths intersect with successive considerations throughout history concerning the first principles behind Page 5 →speech and writing. Rhetorical myths sometimes suggest the appropriate cultural role of human speech and writing and sometimes its origins. They are nonsystematic but didactic and preceptual in nature. They relate to the ethical, technical, and philosophical underpinnings of human symbolic expression.

The definition of “rhetoric” in this book eschews the complex. It defines rhetoric as the knowledge of first principles before the act of speaking or writing. But suppose one uses an Aristotelian definition, thereby defining rhetoric as the knowledge of all available means of persuasion. In that case, this book will likewise demonstrate that this knowledge was discretely identified through myth well in advance of the technical rhetorics of the ancient world. Rhetorical myths implicated categorical considerations that preoccupied classical rhetoricians, such as a speaker’s ethos, memory, invention, and the telos of speech. They sometimes suggest the appropriate cultural role of human speech and writing and sometimes its origins. While many rhetorical histories have relied on an analysis of treatise-bound expressions of rhetorical precept and theory, this book examines rhetorical myth as an expression of these same concepts that are metaphorical and analogical. In the next several pages, I recount how the development of rhetorical scholarship warrants such an inquiry.

Aristotle’s (2006) identification and subdivision of rhetoric was part of his fundamentally ontological project to taxonomize and classify all human knowledge and knowable objects, abstract or concrete. In philosophical parlance, the telos of his encyclopedic enterprise was, therefore, ontological: to identify groups and relations of things that have been, including the useful concepts and arts of humankind. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell (1970) has observed that theories of rhetoric have an ontological foundation, particularly viable in the assumption that “theories of symbolic behavior explain that he is rhetorical because he is the symbol-using or signifying animal” (p. 97). The validity and relation of humans to rhetoric posit an independent existence of each, but traditional conceptions of rhetoric privilege expressions of this in synthetic and treatise-bound expressions, largely beginning with Aristotle. Aristotle never overtly described the principles governing his classification in a separate work, though the Categories were an early treatment of ontology (1938, Book IX). In the history of rhetoric, human myth as a viable expression of rhetorical theory represented a divergence from a systematized order of precepts to an ontological order of knowledge. That other cultures might have discursive and, in Page 6 →turn, hermeneutical means of conveying the being and logical relationships of rhetoric to other existing areas of human knowledge is difficult to demonstrate by way of comparison to post–Aristotelian assumptions about the structure of knowledge. To this end, the first hurdle to overcome is to understand the reception and use of myths as ontological truth propositions. The second is to point out the place of rhetoric in these identifications. The global scale of rhetorical myths and the similar ways they convey profound propositions concerning the nature, qualities, origins, and relations of rhetoric to other fields of knowledge is a central inquiry of this book.

One reason for the scarcity of scholarship on the relationship of myth and rhetoric related to historiographical assumptions is that rhetoric was a spontaneous invention of Greek culture in the fourth or fifth century bce. This dated paradigm constituted an onomastic fallacy, a type of logical error that occurs when someone assumes that the meaning of a word or name is inherent in the word itself, rather than in the manner it is used, in context or in relation to other words. The onomastic fallacy occurs when one imputes the character of a thing to something inherent in its nominal expression. The onomastic fallacy can also extend not merely to things and properties of things, but to concepts between cultures. To assume that the only manifestation of rhetoric must be rhêtorikê in ancient Greek and that rhetoric must be Greek without comparable or distinct analogs across the ancient world constitutes the same fallacy. The onomastic fallacy has been observed in a number of cross-cultural contexts, particularly in social psychology (Georgas, van de Vijver, & Berry, 2004). In that context, the name of a culture is substituted to explain a more general phenomenon without accounting for the cultural variables that vary its manifestation in other cultures. The fallacy is thereby akin to tautological reasoning. The argument was historically presented as logical because rhêtorikê is a Greek word coined in Greece. Thus, the historiographical conceit is one where there is a conflation of the name of a thing with its inherent qualities, and this conceit commits the onomastic fallacy (see, e.g., Schiappa, 1990, 1992, 1999). The onomastic fallacy was an assertion that “rhetoric” could only be defined by Graeco-Roman standards; by extension, its origin must lay in a period we identify as the Graeco-Roman classical period.

One part of the limited examination of myth in rhetorical studies owes to another historiographical conceit: intellectual history was a linear path of influences beginning in ancient Greece and proceeding onward through the Western Middle Ages, eventually finding other expressions in Western contemporary thought. A continuum of learned treatises dominates the study of Page 7 →rhetoric under this historiographical paradigm. T. Cole (1991a) addressed the proto-rhetorical discourse in the form of allegory in ancient Greece, coining the term “rhetorical myth” in the context of Plato’s (1921) Protagoras, though in a sense narrower than my own. Cole suggested that there was no truly linear path for the development of rhetoric from exempla to treatise comprising a single history of rhetoric. However, out of these early trends, an existing theoretical framework emerged that might accommodate rhetorical myths as formative to a culture’s rhetorical theory over time. Schiappa (1999) cited the myths of Corax and Tisias as a preface to the development of technical rhetoric in the fifth century bce, and he cites mythic accounts, specifically Hesiod and Homer as “implicit … theories of persuasion and discourse” (p. 28). Classical rhetoricians often cite the Corax and Tisias myth and the attendant details of their narrative as akin to myth. Gencarella’s (2007) inquiry into the Corax and Tisias narrative as a “Myth of Rhetoric” suggests that it is a form of “folkloric expression” (p. 257). Murphy et al. (2013) described the account as “legendary” and explained that the narrative attained quasi-mythological status as a didactic narrative about an ancient conceptual quarrel about the comparative value of the forensic and legislative rhetorical genres (p. 5). By the time of the Byzantine Empire, Corax and Tisias mythology had emerged as a fully formed mythic narrative regarding a dispute between parties in a lawsuit (Cole, 1991a). For purposes of this argument, the idea of Corax as a representation of the crow—familiar of Apollo, harbinger of death, sacred cicada to the muses, but also a bird—may bear significance to earlier mythic expressions. Enos (2011) has offered this culminating statement to summarize the debate: “Rhetoric’s characteristics were evident in early Hellenic discourse long before rhetoric was recognized as a discipline” (p. 23).

Jeffrey Walker’s (2000) work was formative in dispelling these presumptions; others followed and preceded his work. Extending his examination beyond the mythic narrative of Corax and Tisias as the principal evidence of rhetoric’s mythic origins, Walker pointed to epic poetry that took as its subject mythological narratives, which he characterized as preconceptual eloquence (p. 4). Because Walker still deemed the mythopoetic “preconceptual,” which constitutes an implicit advancement of the proposition that rhetoric only became an ordering of rational concepts when conveyed with the ontology of Greek thought, the concession was a partial one. Walker partially allowed this schema of continuous development originating in Greece by following Eric Havelock’s (1963) precedent. But Havelock’s (1986) historiographical conceit arguably relates to Ernst Cassirer’s (1946) theory of myth as a prerational state Page 8 →imagined worldwide which was a stage before “theoretical discursive thought” (p. 187); Cassirer himself described his interpretation as an “imaginary and speculative evolutionary scheme” (p. 177). Brian Vickers (1984) had previously pointed out the comparative absurdity of the notion of a global movement from mythical to logical thought (p. 97). Walker (2000) reasoned that evidence of the origin of rhetoric in mythopoetic discourse is reflected in the many ways poetic discourse could move a hearer as effectively as reasoned argument (pp. 23, 5–7). Hesiod used this kind of discourse, itself embedded in a traditional mythopoetic genre, as a force that could bring peace and accord to the polis. In the polis’ ability to “recall, interpret, and apply” their art to questions, they facilitate a communal answer from the past that might be extrapolated to present dilemmas (7).

Richard L. Enos (2011) has explained that Homeric discourse depicts eloquence as “god-given” but has likewise discarded the presumption that mythic discourse was merely “pre-rational” in pre-Socratic thought (p. 17). Susan Jarratt’s (1991) work was likewise pivotal in its early criticisms of the conventional narrative that a binary relationship existed between muthos and logos, narrativized by former rhetorical historians as a transition from “one form of consciousness to another,” one somehow prerational and the other orderly (p. 31). This binarization became long formalized even prior to Lévi-Strauss (1955), so much so that it became narrativized as a kind of evolutionary cognitive development in human history. Rejecting the antiquated notion that myths were merely primitive causal explanations of natural phenomena, Jarratt (1991) observed that myths could provide a host of other inferences and information (p. 32). The Homeric epics demonstrate that the “ ‘mythic’ condition” of human consciousness could “not be said to exclude certain forms of ‘logic’ later formalized” (p. 37). That narrative mythic expression was implicitly preliterate, nonrational, and therefore inferior to “logical” expression (or merely a precursor to it), was thus cast in significant doubt by Jarratt. Similarly, Ekaterina Haskins (2004) redressed “the traditional opposition between ‘mythopoetic’ and ‘rational’ notions of speech” by characterizing the traditional histories of rhetoric as scripted tales “of cultural and technological progress,” suggesting that the notion of a direct evolution from benighted myth to literate rhetoric is an oversimplification (p. 159). Unlike narratives of “evolutionary progress,” Haskins (2001) called for “viewing mythos and logos not as polarized states of culture but as complementary linguistic resources”: logos, far from existing in a binary opposition to mythos, is compatible “with the transcendental quality of myth” (p. 163). Christopher Johnstone (2012) extended Walker’s argument Page 9 →when observed that this transition was neither linear nor sudden or final and was associated with the development of alphabetic systems (p. 37). When Greek writing systems became widespread in the eighth century bce they recorded myths in writing, which permitted them to be critically interrogated (pp. 39–40). But more significantly, he argued that “mythopoetic consciousness is not specific to a given culture” or era (p. 14).

In recent years, these changes in scholarly presumptions precipitated a shift in focus to global and cultural rhetorics that began with Kennedy’s early identification and were rapidly expanded by a host of others. Great strides have been made in comparative rhetoric by scholars in cultures and eras which this book cannot comprehensively detail.¹ Without such advances, this inquiry would be ill-formed. A significant early beginning to this inquiry was the work of Fox (1983), Covino (1994) and the collection Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks (Lipson & Binkley, 2004), which advanced both Sumeria and Egypt as viable sources of early rhetorics predating Hellenic antiquity. In one key essay in this collection, Lipson (2004) identified the manner in which the Egyptians identified abstract concepts as nominative personifications or anthropomorphizations. Other scholars have examined myth in a variety of cultures (see, e.g., Baniya, 2020; Frentz, 2006; Lively, 2020; Johnson-Sheehan & Lynch, 2007; Knudsen, 2014). Most recently, an abundance of often disparate authority concerning global and cultural rhetorics has appeared. Many of them have been helpfully collected in two major recent anthologies: The Routledge Handbook of Comparative World Rhetorics (Lloyd, 2023) and The Routledge Handbook of Descriptive Rhetorical Studies and World Languages (Wei & Schnell, 2023).

The foregoing review is an uncomprehensive account of relevant authority in global rhetorics, principally because this book concerns a very specific phenomenon in global rhetoric. Many scholars are advancing work in cultural rhetoric, but to note, scholars making great advances in the study of Near Eastern and Egyptian mythic sources are Melba Ortiz (2020) in regard to Ma’at and Hany Rashwan (2015) in an Egyptian context. Rashwan is a highly trained scholar in the Egyptological tradition with unique and pertinent insights spanning the Old Kingdom to the Arabic-speaking inheritors of that intellectual tradition. Rashwan has illustrated well in advance of this work that “scholars of non-Western argumentation should be aware that in the strongly literary societies, such as ancient Near Eastern cultures, the interrelationships between argumentation and the literary devices used to express the intended persuasive message are strong “and ultimately seem to ‘bury’ ” traditional notions of argumentation (p. 852). Rashwan’s proximity to and familiarity with Egyptological Page 10 →resources makes him a key figure in a contemporary understanding of this rhetorical tradition. This volume attempts to address ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian cultures on their own terms and contexts and better explain the analogical, ontological, and mythic forms of argument these cultures advanced. The rhetorical tradition in the Near East, Egypt, and Greece represents a specifically attenuated change in one intellectual climate that is readily observable in the relationship of myth and rhetoric.

I move on now to demystify the meaning of “rhetorical” as a key part of the definition of “rhetorical myth.” Definitions of rhetoric are so contrastive in history that while the concept of rhetoric appears to be numinously present at all times, there seems to be little agreement on its nature; rhetoric itself, thereby, has an oddly mythic quality. The definition at work herein does not require elaborate taxonomies of rhetoric or other conceptual gymnastics. As a part of their salient hallmarks, rhetorical myths possess a preceptually didactic role and contemplate the generative design of discourse. By using a narrow definition of rhetoric as a set of considerations governing the prospective construction of discourse, I proceed from the observation that myth conveyed these preceptual considerations in a sophisticated way. Likewise, ancient cultures possessed a sophisticated hermeneutic approach when interpreting these myths governed by their own cultural norms.

Thus, mythic exemplary figures and narratives could contain layers of associative meanings that were “revealed” to the cultures that made use of them, including myths that conveyed rhetorical precepts. These precepts could bear on epistemological considerations, cultural considerations, ethical considerations, practical considerations, and a host of other factors a rhetor might consider before writing or speaking. When this argument proposes that rhetorical myths are identifiable through their common categorical topoi or their ontological assumptions, I do not suggest that myths are rhetorical in the same sense that Wayne Booth (1982) applied the term to fictional narrative. In Booth’s use of rhetoric as a critical tool, he argued that the form of narrative itself is inherently ideological or purpose-driven in form and function. Nor are myths rhetorical because they apply rhetorical devices in their telling; all myths do so. More specifically than these common uses of the word “rhetorical” to describe and analyze textual artifacts, a myth is rhetorical when offered as a perceptual lesson about the purpose and means of creating a discourse that Page 11 →can have philosophical or practical dimensions. Alternatively, a myth might be used rhetorically when employed to persuade an audience.

Ancient cultures, particularly in Sumeria and Egypt, believed ideas were so autonomous that they possessed a species of near-personhood as an ontological presumption. They believed these entia prefigured rhetorical agency in some expressions and prefigured humanity itself in a radical form of conceptual autonomy (Jung 1959a, 1959c). To suggest that such conceptual identification of rhetoric was primitive or prerational is akin to alleging that although the Sumerians possessed sexagesimal trigonometry in advance of Greece by 1500 years, they did not understand it because they named it something else (Manfield & Wildberger, 2017). When a culture designates concepts as persons or systems of relations or does not ontologically categorize concepts in nominally similar ways, then they theorize rhetoric from a different categorical framework than the ancient Greeks; their rhetoric must be examined based on their own categorical systems. Ancient cultures employed extended metaphors through personifications to represent rhetoric; the noun for rhetoric was created by means of analogy through a divine figure or a mythic narrative. These narratives were thus much like a fourth type metaphor described by Aristotle (Nimis, 1988).

As a class of metaphorical analogy, some myth functions through it use of exempla, whether gods, heroes, or sets of narrative situations. Analogical metaphor and its function might be conflated with other extended metaphors such as fabula or allegoria. By contrast, Egypt did not express mythic conceptions of rhetoric with narratives but rather in the composite qualities of their deities. Doty (2000) explained that the deep structure of myth “is the underlying principle (at times approaching the Platonic ideal forms, at other times the energizing dynamics of the Jungian archetypes)” which in turn generates surface structures in societies, and it is through this principle of underlying structures that myths cross multiple cultures (p. 195; see Piehler, 1991). The deep structure latent in the genera of myth systems, or their topoi as ontological categories, is the mechanism of action that permits rhetorical myths to map concepts across cultural systems. It does so in many cultures through an analogical function. In the context of analogy as fundamentally metaphorical, Frentz (2011) has observed that the origin of the human will to think metaphorically may itself be related to the deep structure of the human psyche; to Frentz, metaphor itself may “emanate from the personal unconscious, where shared ideological commitments and rhetorical exigencies coexist” (p. 127).

Following these authoritative precedents, the logical scholarly assumptions that warrant this inquiry might be as follows. First, rhetoric existed long before Page 12 →its onomastic description as a discrete field of knowledge in Greece. Additionally, rhetoric’s formative origins can be assumed to be attributable to mythic articulations and figures just as formative as later rationalist syntheses of rhetoric. In that case, mythic articulations of rhetoric may have existed before the Greeks. Finally, if rhetoric existed outside ancient Greece, then logically, rhetorical myths outside those geographical and cultural confines would be relevant to early and distinct formations of the theory of rhetoric. Therefore, in this volume I examine the rhetorical act of mythologizing itself through the tropic and argumentative devices it employs and how myth created rhetorical theory. Myths and mythmaking were formative rhetorical activities that seem inextricably linked to the nature of human consciousness and the concepts they evidenced in culturally specific contexts. Apart from pointing to a wealth of mythic rhetorical sources, figures, and concepts, in this book I advance the proposition that the difference between mythic traditions from Sumeria to Hellenic antiquity was a fundamentally ontological one.

Among its other central preoccupations, ancient myth reflects a desire to articulate the being of abstract principles in this world. One must speculate that simultaneously emerging writing systems became of central importance to the Sumerians and Egyptians and were another attempt to address the conceptually inchoate to convey to it a tangible being. In any case, one principal action of their myths was to convey the ontological presence of abstractions to the realities of this world, or to provide models for the way that concepts manifested as being. This book suggests that a better way to understand myth is to understand the rhetorical commonalities in the way they deploy myth and for specific cultural ends. This illuminates not only how rhetoric is shaped by myth but also how myth is shaped by rhetoric. The rhetorical telos of myth might be to warn, to inspire, or to instruct, but tacitly myths in the ancient world permitted speakers and writers to map by expression the utmost limits and distant boundaries of the knowable world. They formed a foundational shape to the external limits of knowledge, and in so doing, they conveyed the beginning and end of the epistemically verifiable. Rather than being offered the truth of the facts they conveyed, they were employed by speakers to signal that they had reached the threshold of generational knowledge of a given field—in this case, rhetoric. In other words, myths serve a rhetorical function to convey that here is the beginning or end of our knowledge. This rhetorical Page 13 →function exemplified by myth is unique, because it provided cartographical shape to the human past, signaling that the listener has reached the limit of a flat earth of intergenerational record. The rhetoric of myth suggested that it was beyond this point that we know only the shape of things and not the things in themselves, and it was thereby an ontological statement.

Although rhetorical myths vary radically in their details and the nature of the personae that inhabit them, they share conceptual commonalities. When I refer to the commonalities, I am not referring to the myths themselves, but systemic orders of analogy that are the categorical topoi they share; these are referred to as “mythemes” in mythographic scholarship. Mythography analyzes the characteristics, foundations, importance, and chronology of myths and mythological writings.² One basic categorical identifier of rhetorical myths is that they referentially use formative exempla in the act of persuasion. Exempla in Graeco-Roman rhetoric were typically “proofs drawn from persons and their actions and words” (Van Der Poel, 2009, 334). By the time of Cicero and Quintilian, exempla were treated as a “stylistic device” (p. 337). But in Sumerian, Egyptian, and even Greek rhetoric, exempla could take the form of dynamic narratives with exemplary figures in them. Moreover, in Egypt and Sumeria, the exempla could be categorical analogs of abstract concepts. They were therefore characterized as ideas possessing autonomous volition or ontological being. An example of a rhetorical myth’s categorical nature is its explanation for the origin of rhetoric itself. In such tales, the origin of rhetoric is an ontological category of being. Another ontological category is the way certain myths posit the segregation of ideas into separate spheres but attribute to ideas agency and autonomy. Whether the myth suggests rhetorical ideas descend from the world of the gods, the logos, or the House of Wisdom, they tend to convey them through entia of a persistent and nonlocal nature. Therefore, another ontological category expressed in myth is an assumption that rhetorical powers and concepts could be personified by autonomous entities that inhabit a world separate from our own.

Myths frequently depicted rhetoric itself as exerting an independent life and volitional character of its own. It is conceptually conveyed by personifications that intrude into our co-existent world through their own agency or appear miraculously in certain incidental occurrences. These myths in antiquity were offered as propositions equally true and untrue in the same utterance and were often understood as both; there are myth systems today that express similar ontological perspectives. Fortunately, there is a living culture to illustrate a rhetorical myth system with ontological qualities. In the rhetorical myth system of Page 14 →the Pintupi people, symbolic expression derives from categories of comparison that have rendered anthropological investigators at a loss for viable descriptive terminology. Anthropological luminaries frequently preface any discussion of the aboriginal hierarchy of knowledge by acknowledging their inability to describe it. Stanner (1979) called it an “ontological” worldview that was distinct from others, where things, people, and ideas are largely unsegregated and become one in (and from) the Dreamtime. Rhetorical myth systems in aboriginal Australian cultures focus on conceptual places and mythical personae and relations between the two. Aboriginal cultures compose myths that derive from ontology in which rhetorical principles are implicit. Their conception of “the Dreamtime” is itself ontological and acts as a set of rhetorical principles for composing new myths to teach. These rhetorical principles rely on a nearly subconscious field of culturally shared presuppositions about mythmaking.

This ontological “field” is called, in some dialects, Tjukurrpa. Tjukurrpa is a broad concept governing the “place” where myth originates, found in the dialect words Tjukurrpa in Pitjantjatjarra and Alcheringa in Arrente, as well as other cognates across the various Aboriginal nations. It is frequently rendered into English as “The Law” or “The Dreaming.” Fred R. Myers (1991) has described Tjukurrpa-dreaming as “a projection into symbolic space of various social processes,” among them myth and mythologizing, or the creation and transmission of turiku (p. 47). The rhetorical myths of the Pintupi tend to “reproduce [themselves] in space and time” (p. 49); those myths, far more than just being falsehoods, imply a real world and a conceptual one that exists side by side with our own. When the Pintupi describe the relationship of these coequal words, they say, “from the Dreaming, it becomes real” (p. 53). The Dreamtime conveys the shape of the environment as the turiku, which includes narrative, painting, ritual, and persuasive speech acts to reify Tjukurrpa in a shared reality. Jacintra Koolmatrie (2020) asserted: “They are told through the marking of the walls using sacred pigments the land has provided for us. They are the foundations of our songs and dances. Our language itself would not exist without these stories.” Mythic expressions of Tjukurrpa establish complex relationships like a map that charts complex associations with the world, ideas, space, and other people.

Myth and mythologizing from Tjukurrpa is ontological to the worldview of the aboriginal cultures of the Western Desert, so much so that Stanner (1979) wrote: “tales are a kind of commentary, or statement, on what is thought to be permanent and ordained” and that “they are a way of stating the principle which animates things” (p. 57). Tjukurrpa necessarily incorporates myths about how to construct discourse, and sometimes their myths are perceptual counsel for Page 15 →mythmaking, or hypodeictic in nature. Such myths can be wholly theoretical and confer meaning upon the generative nature and power of narratives about discourse or any of the other generative symbolic acts that make us human. Just as other cultures use myth to grapple with the historical, metaphysical, and material world, Aboriginal conceptual reality coexists with the external world but is one in which “thoughts are assembled, somehow inside and outside the human mind at the same time” (p. 156). In Japaljarri Spencer’s language, “Tjukurrpa talks to you”; Tjukurrpa gets “lonely for people” (San Roque, 2006, p. 156). Austro-aboriginal myths likewise posit the reality of autonomous intermediaries responsible for transmitting ideas between worlds. This is not to assert that the ancient Sumerians or Egyptians possessed an identical ontological framework as the Pintupi but to illustrate that myth has rhetorical and ontological dimensions that can constitute a fortress of meaning between cultures. An undercurrent of mythic thought that extended to Plato’s time was myth’s function as a rhetoric that derived from ontological—thereby categorical—suppositions. These vary across other cultures in their understanding of how fields of knowledge related to one another. These myth systems use new and different categorical comparisons to convey rhetorical precept. Rhetorical myths exist in a continuum of symbolic action perceived as separate and autonomous.

One qualification exists critical to an understanding of myth among the Pintupi, which is likely generalizable to Sumerian, Egyptian, and Greek world-views. There exists a dated notion that an ontological perspective on the reality of myth somehow rendered cultures childlike or prerational. This belief is demonstrably false in the example of the living culture of the Pintupi. Stanner (1979) emphasized that although the Pintupi ontologically integrate their perspective of the world with their myth system, they know that humans create myths and can certainly apprehend the difference between the “real” and the mythic. As I discuss in the following chapters, in myth systems both living and dead, the scope of ontic expression is not shorthand for an inability to apprehend reality in a rational manner. On the contrary, it centrally alters the rhetorical approach of cultures to convey reality for rhetorical ends. It conveys truth through falsehood and is fictional and tangibly real at once. As late as Phaedrus, Greek rhetorical myth reiterates this puzzling anachronism.

Like Tjukurrpa, the identification of rhetoric in other cultures was a substantive and inter-relational form of knowledge that was ultimately an ontological one. Page 16 →Ontology, generally, is a division of philosophy with a largely modern provenance and involves the question of what exists. In its early forms, ontology concerned the nature and relation of the separation and collection of conceptual things. As Reinhardt Grossman (1992) best put it, ontology asks two interrelated questions: “What are the categories of the world? And what are the laws that govern these categories?” (p. 1). Categorical inquiries embraced formal logic, metaphysics, and more. Zalta (1983) noted that “philosophers who postulated theoretical entities,” if they were describing anything, were “describing entities which can be found in our background ontology” (p. 2). Such abstract attributes applied to theoretical entities are, therefore, “discussions about existing or abstract objects, properties, or relations” (p. 2). Abstractions such as rhetoric are as valid in some theories of ontology as concrete objects. Carnap (1950) explained that “references to space-time points, the electromagnetic field, or electrons in physics, to real or complex numbers and their functions in mathematics, to the excitatory potential or unconscious complexes in psychology, to an inflationary trend in economics, and the like, do not imply the assertion that entities of these kinds occur as immediate data” (p. 47). But they and their relations to other things that exist are no less valid ontological identifications.

Thus, many theorists also applied ontological inquiry to abstractions and their interrelationship with other things. Long preceding this contemporary evolution, the question of the reality of abstractions pervaded questions at work in Plato and Aristotle. In its earliest manifestations, Plato readily applied the inquiry to the existence of abstract concepts. The very idea of the preeminence of conceptual Forms over individual manifestations of concepts is an ontological inquiry: in sum, Plato inquired whether ideas like love, friendship, rhetoric, and knowledge have an objective existence that was categorically distinct from their instantiations in the world around us. To Plato, there was a more real order of reality inhabited by categorical beings that were more real than observable examples of those things in everyday life. Plato’s treatment also applied to rhetoric, as he attempted in Phaedrus to examine true rhetoric in the abstract in contrast to a falsehood offered by the sophists.

The Sumerians did not designate rhetoric nominally, but mythologically, which likewise implicates relational ontology. Carnap (1950) has explained that, as a principle of ontology, whenever there is an “acceptance of a new kind” of entity, language must represent them “by the introduction of a framework of new forms of expressions to be used according to a new set of rules” (p. 30). For the Greeks, this acceptance was to designate the term rhêtorikê onomastically and systematize its parts. For the Sumerians, however, it was to Page 17 →anthropomorphically convey the concept of rhetoric in the person of the goddess. Because divinities could represent a synthesis of concepts, divinity could be a causal agent in dynamic social systems. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell (1970) asserted that rhetoric derives its ontological “thingness” from the human propensity to interpret and convey signs. Campbell explained that in the context of “theories of symbolic behavior, persuasion is a process in which the individual creates his meaning through detecting, identifying, and interpreting the Stimuli he receives and which is integrated into and hence influences his perceptual framework” (p. 104). Persuasion and rhetoric are necessary and real “to induce identification and cooperation to overcome the conflicts natural to the human condition” (p. 104). Rhetoric can be an extension of human meaning-making “because language may be used both to modify man’s basic needs and to influence his symbolically created social and cultural motives” (p. 104). For the Sumerians, the nature of signs was central to their view of the universe and human life, and the presence of signs necessitated the possibility of metaphorical expression. The Sumerians anthropomorphized rhetoric as a discrete area of knowledge and narrated its operation as a causal node in human experience.

A secondary action of rhetorical myths is how they conveyed the interrelational presence of concepts between themselves and other beings. To express it another way, rhetorical myths conveyed not only the ontological presence of abstractions in the realities of this world but also the way other beings employed these abstractions in relation to one another. The mechanism of rhetorical action inherent in myth is structural, and this nature is what permits myths to map concepts across cultural systems. Thus, the mythic presumption that ideas themselves possess autonomy can be found in European, Near Eastern, and Austro-Aboriginal rhetoric. Myth acts as a regulating code between texts and within texts and between texts and concepts outside of them (Lévi-Strauss, 1963, p. 65). The relational ontology of rhetorical myth can map the history of rhetoric between personae, systems, and functions.

Relational ontology posits that the connections between entities hold greater ontological significance than the entities in and of themselves. An ontological system of relationships, not its technical subparts, gave rhetoric its meaning in ancient Sumeria and Egypt. To a certain extent—more philosophical than historical—Greek rhetoric became an adaptation and reaction to its ontological predecessors. Rhetoric before Hellenic Greece was inseparable from Page 18 →the embedded processes and other conceptual associations and practices as an interstitial part. Thus, its complex meaning was a product of these relational systems, too. Relational ontology was grounded in early metaphysical and theological theory that analyzed the triune nature of Christ, at least as a precursor to its modern manifestation. Atran et al. (2002, p. 422) and Boyer (1998, p. 878) have identified the concept of a “folk theory of relation” in which individuals tend to perceive supernatural explanations for events and phenomena attributable to a belief system that connects the natural and supernatural realms. The dismissive characterization of this phenomenon is not historically or anthropologically suitable to this inquiry, because the connection between the natural and supernatural world was socially fundamental to the Sumerians. The Sumerian conception of rhetoric took as its beginning point the relationship between Nisaba-as-goddess and Nisaba-as-concept, a supernatural world, and her ontological relations to our own.

Relational ontology likewise suggests that the characteristics and identities of all organisms and objects exist through the relationships they possess rather than possessing an inherent essence. Therefore, the attributes of conceptual entities, such as rhetoric, depend on their context rather than being independently determined. In the context of anthropology, relational ontology has been examined by Bird-David (1999), Naveh and Bird-David (2014), Ingold (2006), and Willerslev (2007), and it is in this anthropological adoption of relational ontology that myth might best be understood in its function of conceptual mapping, as suggested by Lévi-Strauss (2013; see especially Herva, Nordqvist, Lahelma, & Ikäheimo, 2010). Carnap (2003) argued that ontology generally assumes that “there may be new names for particular entities of the kind in question; but some such names may already occur in the language before the introduction of the new framework” (p. 25). Therefore, in a given culture or system the idea of rhetoric may precede its onomastic designation. The most straightforward description of relational ontology appears in F. H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality (1897). In contrast to the qualities of either real or conceptual objects, Bradley’s position was that the qualities of objects “can have no meaning except as contained in and as dependent on some whole” (p. 17). By way of example, under Bradley’s schema, if the mere place of a rhetorical act changes, it would not change the concept of rhetoric. Bradley concluded that these external—relational—ontologies are “mere abstractions from a more concrete qualitative unity” of place and concept (quoted in Oliver, 2012, p. 48). The term “rhetoric” itself would possess no inherent meaning in the parlance of relational ontology except by analysis of its relation to other things, objects, persons, systems, or Page 19 →concepts—in the shorthand of ontology, other beings. In Egypt and Sumeria, rhetoric was thereby very much alive and autonomous: the autonomy of ideas is a major recurring theme of rhetorical myth.

The written recordation of mythic rhetoric emphasized ontological distinction instead of categorical distinction and found its genesis in Mesopotamia. The mythmaking practices that expressed rhetorical theory evidence a previously unrecorded way of showing the relations between the concepts and categories in a subject area or domain; thereby, it was a new ontological expression of the nature of rhetoric. Other cultures have different ontological perspectives about myth, such as how Tjukurrpa forms a maplike system of relationships between peoples such as the Pintuppi. The means of expressing myths is also rhetorical. To the Aboriginal Australians creating Tjukurrpa stories, the past, the future, the geography, and the concepts that bind them together in one perspective do not create the same ontological divisions as those emerging in Sumeria, Egypt, and other centers of the ancient world around 2650 bce. A belief in the conceptual autonomy of rhetoric, therefore, represents a cultural shift that eventually became cognitive and philosophical. It occurred due to the ontological categorical comparisons imposed by Sumerian and Egyptian understanding of being. The Sumerians represent the beginning of the division of humans into individual unitary persuasive actors, but it was by no means complete. In Egypt, ontological approaches to rhetoric did not represent an evolution, but a constellation of perspectives that shaped rhetoric as a discrete field of knowledge. Even in Greece, myth transformed and articulated the outlines of rhetorical theory at an ontological level. Eventually, Greek culture began to dialogically interrogate the mythic autonomy of rhetorical impulses and was arguably never free from the deep intellectual strata of ancient mythic tradition.

The following chapters offer examples of the myths close to Western audiences’ geographical range of cultural and historical familiarity. These more familiar rhetorical myths bridge the gulf between radically different cultures but illustrate how both occupy the same space at certain nexuses. These examples of rhetorical myths also illustrate the function of their transmission within rhetorical history and not merely as a catalog of historically ordered myths. It would be inherently counterproductive to attempt to establish a narrative of direct transmission of the concepts and major themes underpinning these Page 20 →mythologies from a historical or documentary perspective. This argument is not a history of the connection of works like The Book of Thoth and Phaedrus, but it also does not suggest there is no such connection. Hallmarks and traits of improbable similarity identify the Egyptian goddess Seshat and the Sumerian goddess Nisaba. However, the chapters that follow offer these myths to illustrate their function of transmission and cogent similarities, as well as what makes them unique in the operations of distinct ancient cultures; the myths, even unfamiliar to us, are just many shadows of the same idea that variously approximate one thing. Their existence is illustrated through ontological difference, not inferiority, but their mode of exposition is likewise explored by way of illustration. This book will also illustrate that subsequent to the ontological identification of rhetoric, the Sumerians, Egyptians, and Greeks extended the relationship of rhetoric to other concepts, such as epistemology, sign theory, and even their distinctive cultural identity as socially rhetorical actors.

Chapter 1 will introduce the Sumerians and their culture’s history of rhetoric and language theory. It will then illustrate that the earliest recorded expression of Sumerian rhetorical theory was expressed through the deity, Nisaba of Eres, as a personification of rhetoric. Nisaba represented the union of archival knowledge and reasoned prospective design and personified and conveyed rhetorical power to human actors as a creative and epistemic force. She was an identification of rhetoric in the form of a mythic personification whose appearance coincided with the Sumerian invention of writing. Nisaba herself was an anthropomorphic and conceptual expression of rhetoric; she acted as an ontological identification of rhetoric as a union of the means to archival knowledge and the means to communicate it to others. Chapter 2 examines the Enmerkar myths as pedagogical and conceptual tools and the earliest narrative mythic expression of rhetorical action as an expression of relational ontology. It also introduces specific Sumerian terms for eloquence, notably inim, in epics such as Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta and Lugalbanda in the Wilderness. This chapter will likewise illustrate how this theory of rhetoric was situated and contextualized analogically. Sumerian rhetoric contextualizes the narrative interaction of metaphorical systems, persons, and cultures.

Chapter 3 shifts radically in place (but not time) to illustrate how Egyptian myth systems eerily aligned and were distinct from those of Sumeria. These mythic expressions, in the goddess Seshat, appeared in near-synchrony with Sumerian thought in the third millennium bce. Chapter 3 provides a brief contextual introduction to the rhetorical theory and history of rhetoric-as-being in Egypt and illustrates both the ontological identification of rhetoric in Egyptian Page 21 →culture. Seshat, like Nisaba, represented the union of archival knowledge and prospective future design through conceptual personification and patronage of the art of writing. It is also demonstrable that Seshat was identified as a goddess closely aligned with rhetoric by the ancient Greek conquerors after the time of Plato. Hellenic conquerors identified Seshat as a conceptual recognition of rhetoric by non-Hellenes. Chapter 4 turns to Thoth and illustrates the Egyptian myths and mythemes surrounding Thoth as an expression of rhetoric’s relational ontology. Thoth’s conceptual role in rhetorical theory made his relational nature integral to Egyptian rhetorical culture. Thoth preserved the categorical order of things, principally through access to language, and more significantly, by forbidding access to language. Thoth’s “magical” nature was fundamentally relational, categorical, and rhetorical, rather than mystical or supernatural.

Chapters 5 and 6 focus on Greek rhetoricians’ reception and dialogic reaction to Egyptian and Orphic mythic rhetorical traditions. In the Derveni papyrus, we see how early presocratic thinkers seemed to formulate a theory of language in relation to the gods. The Derveni papyrus is the earliest suggestion that the sophists, particularly Prodicus of Ceos, viewed the gods as cultural heroes. They drew on cultural heroes as rhetorical exemplars and sometimes attributed early rhetorical theory to them. This evidence is fragmentary at best. However, Isocrates, in Busiris, reacted not only to this tradition, offering preceptual counsel about the use of myth in rhetoric, but also to Plato’s adoption of Egyptian mythic themes in his dialogues. This chapter also treats Plato’s adoption of Thoth. Chapter 6 will more fully illustrate both Plato’s theory and deployment of rhetorical myth with the little-examined narration of Critias, which occurs in the dialogues Critias and Timaeus (Plato, 1925). But just as significantly, Chapter 6 provides a connection between Plato’s perceptions of Egyptian myth as fundamentally rhetorical in the way he portrays Atlantis as a rhetorically oriented cautionary tale. Timaeus and Critias provide a new insight into Plato’s perspective on the role of writing and rhetorical processes in the social order. It likewise provides insight into Plato’s deployment of inherited mythical tradition for protreptic rhetorical ends. This book concludes with a summative assessment of rhetorical myth, not merely in the limited synchronic historical milieu of previous chapters, but toward a more global tradition.