This article explores perhaps the earliest evolved assay of talk interaction in the Western world, the Ancient Egyptian Instructions of Ptahhotep. It fills a gap in the early history of social interaction analysis, is a socially-linked account of talk, and it also had some impact on the rise of European talk-in-interaction instructions. To do justice to the intricacy and wide coverage of the Instructions, this empirical inquiry employs Critical Discourse Analysis to explore the text’s social and contextual rhetoric, and Speech Act Analysis. Conversation Analysis (CA) is also employed for a qualitative account of its instructions, expanding CA in line with recent scholarly work. The inquiry trusts to respond to two questions: socio-epistemically, what did Ptahhotep know about the analysis of naturally-occurring interactions? And socio-deontically, how did he integrate this into his text, and make his instructions actionable?