From Sunlight to Shadow and Back Again: Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta and the Function of Analogical Reasoning in Mesopotamian Rhetoric

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Argumentation
• classical rhetoric
• history of rhetoric
• Sumerian rhetoric

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Jacqueline Rhodes, editor, the anonymous peer reviewers, Richard Leo Enos, and Suzan Aiken for their guidance and encouragement.

Notes

¹ The earliest Etemenanki (or Tower of Babel) myth was uncovered in the pseudonymous Tower of Babel Stele of black basaltic rock in 2011. Etemenanki is not mentioned by name in Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta but the narrative seems to suggest the presumptive knowledge of humanity’s linguistic diffusion in prehistory. Scholars have been, for obvious reasons, intrigued with the date of the myth. It has been claimed that Kramer suggested Enmerkar is an early parallel and source for the Babel myth, but this is a complete inaccuracy courtesy of an unidentified Internet auteur. Kramer borrowed the line-numbering system of an Aratta translation to present a translation of an unrelated fragment.

² This essay principally departs from Vanstiphout’s contention that the principle subject of the epic is the invention of trade, and instead is about the relative virtue of written and spoken rhetoric. Still other interpreters, such as Gong Yushu, argue that the meaning is not that Enmerkar invented writing but writing on clay, which perhaps weighs even further to the literal than others based on philological and not contextual evidence (7446).

³ It is clear based on archeological evidence that, at some point, the original pictographic system was no longer used and the educational apparatus of ancient Sumeria began to study writing “for its own sake” (Glassner 103). Van Die Mieroop has similarly stated that published cuneiform texts exceed 50,000 in number, while “even larger quantities remain unpublished in museums” and the numbers still to be excavated “cannot be fathomed” (10–11).

⁴ The complexities here are not without parallel in both Egyptian and Mesopotamian myths. But Plato seems an unreliable font of knowledge on the schema of Egyptian mythology, so in his Thoth myth we have a Greek retelling of a myth about literacy that may be from Egypt, which he concedes through Socrates in the dialog. However, The Hymn of Thoth is verifiably of Egyptian origin and states unequivocally that Thoth brought the “scribal art” to the human world (Goyon 376). The case of Egypt is no less confusing, as Thoth is generally considered the inventor of writing, but his wife, Seshat, was the goddess of writing and measurement (Wainwright 32). Similarly, in Mesopotamia, there is evidence that a dual role in writing was played by a goddess who is either the patron of scribes or scribal activity, Nisaba (Charpin, Reading and Writing 9).

⁵ Enos’s work is extensive and provides dozens of insights that might lead a scholar to look at Enmerkar in a completely different way. See also, generally, Enos and Ackerman and Gelb.

⁶ See Thavapalan. The Mesopotamians had an extremely advanced and nuanced language system to describe and distinguish colors, and color was a very important preoccupation in their culture.

⁷ It is of note that there is an uncanny similarity in the myth of Cangjie in Chinese antiquity. A critical translation of the Cangjie myths, which appear in several sources, is desperately wanting in English but has been aptly summarized by Gong Yushu. Yushu has also treated Enmerkar at book-length, a work sadly untranslated into English. See generally Yushu et. al.