Abstract

This paper examines perhaps the earliest developed analysis of talk interactionin the Western world, the Ancient Egyptian Instructions of Ptahhotep. It fills a gap in the early history of social interaction analysis, is a socially-related account of talk, and it also had some influence on the rise of European talk-in-interaction instructions. To do justice to the complexity and wide coverage of the Instructions, this empirical study uses Critical Discourse Analysis to examine the text's social and contextual rhetoric, and Speech Act Analysis. Conversation Analysis is also used for a qualitative account of its instructions, broadening CA in line with recent scholarly work. The study hopes to answer two questions: socio-epistemically, what did Ptahhotep know about the analysis of naturally-occurring interactions? And socio-deontically, how did he incorporate this into his text, and make his instructions actionable?