This argument demonstrates how rhetorical theory was shaped recursively by the mythology of ancient Sumer and China, and resulted in new discursive formations in subsequent rhetorical theory. These discursive theoretical formations occurred after the advent of widespread literate practice. The myth of Cangjie shaped the teleology of rhetoric of ancient China and the myth of Enmerkar shaped rhetorical theory in Sumer in similar ways. Following the authority of Walker, Schiappa, and Johnstone, which charted a similar phenomenon in ancient Greece, these non-Greco-Roman myths were deployed to form a similar pattern. By following Rita Copeland’s call to “allow the history of rhetoric to be written through mythic time,” it can be shown that the use of myths by ancient cultures to shape their rhetorical theories suggests that this is not merely a Greco-Roman feature of rhetoric in antiquity, but a human one.

This essay will demonstrate how both the cultural and temporal antecedents of classical rhetoric are linked to Mesopotamian writing by their shared use of similes, such as fable, aenigma, and parable as pardeigmae. Mesopotamian myths employed allegory and aenigma to advance a cultural argument that intersects with common theoretical topics in ancient rhetoric through analogical reasoning. Finally, this essay will introduce this obscure but highly relevant source of rhetorical thinking from Mesopotamia and their culturally transmitted theories in a neglected primary source, Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta. This brief epic shares similar philosophical ground with ancient Greco-Roman rhetoric, and addresses rhetoric’s fundamental nature at a much earlier point in history than accounted for in existing histories of classical rhetoric.

This article discusses two nineteenth-century rhetors who engaged in cultural persuasion through their respective lexicons. It argues that lexicography served an epideictic function in nineteenth-century culture, entering educational values and pervading print culture. Nineteenth-century lexicography functioned epideictically as a storehouse of cultural values and influenced the discourse of nineteenth-century rhetorics, evidenced in their concern with clarity, usage, and the disambiguation of language. But there is an acceptance and awareness of the inherent ambiguity of language in nineteenth-century rhetoric, which is also reflected in other satirical lexicons. The two poles of lexicography in theory and practice illustrate how dictionaries became a site of cultural dialogue and dissent.