Legal Rhetoric Today, Evidence & Women

Reading “Law, Rhetoric, and Gender in Ramesside Egypt” by Deborah Sweeney, I was originally intrigued by the similarities I saw between the rhetoric Egyptians used in legal proceedings and the rhetoric seen today in legal proceedings. I am drawing on my very limited knowledge of how legal proceedings actually work in the U.S., so my insight is pretty basic, but we see the use of witnesses, fines and oaths, documents as evidence, rhetorical questions, denying knowledge and exceptions to arguments. We see these things in general everyday disputes. This demonstrates the common devices that seem to be instinctual to humans, across culture and time. 

There were various elements that differed from what we see today that I found very interesting. For example, Sweeney offers an example of a woman calling a witness in order to actually accuse her. This seems counterproductive, but rhetorically that may function to help the suspect. Possibly if she was willing to call on someone to “accuse” her she was actually so confident in her innocence that this was simply a rhetorical way of saying that no one else would accuse her.

While discussing the role of women, Sweeney also brings up another important consideration on page 106: “Since these elements are rare in any case, and since fewer utterances by women have been recorded, this distribution may simply reflect the inadequacy of our sources, rather than a genuine gender difference.” Our understanding of ancient rhetoric relies so heavily on evidence I cannot help but wonder how good our view into these things actually is if we have no way of knowing how good our evidence actually is. We might have a fairly large collection of texts, but what if some something happened and an entire sector of evidence was somehow destroyed? Much of this evidence can stand alone, but gaining an overall, fully developed view of the bigger picture is obviously difficult. How are we to even know if we have a good sample of texts?

This text also answered some of the questions I had after reading Lipson’s piece on Egyptian rhetoric. I was curious as to how literacy and rhetoric functioned in the lower ends of society, and this this piece points out that only elite males and scribes were trained in rhetoric. This also points out that women that were part of these higher classes may have been exposed to this training at home, but there is no evidence if they were actually taught. This relates to the possible lack of evidence about women that Sweeney brings up. It makes sense to me that because there were fewer women who were involved we have less evidence about them.