The major goal of this study is to shed light on one of the most significant rhetorical phenomena that contributes to the production of written and spoken texts. The notion of intertextuality is not new; rather, it has been around for a long time and was recognized by ancient Arab critics, albeit under different titles. In the West, intertextuality was identified by a pair of significant eras: (i) the structuralist era represented by the father of modern linguistics "Ferdinand de Saussure" and his language semiotics; and (ii) the post-structuralist era represented by Bakhtin and his dialogic theory, then followed by Julia Kristeva, who is credited with the coinage of the concept of intertextuality in the 1960s and the transmission of Bakhtin's views into the West. The study concluded that intertextuality was prevailing in both Arabic and English languages and that Arab critics, as well as Western ones, knew it as a phenomenon but not as a term. For the ancient Arab critics, intertextuality was a kind of poetic theft. They provided various titles in their reference to the phenomenon of intertextuality, including (, , , etc.). However, the ancient Arab critics did not study intertextuality as an individual theoretical phenomenon or literary device as Kristeva did. In fact, before the advent of Kristeva and the other Western scholars who followed her approach, both ancient Western and Arab scholars were using intertextuality subconsciously and without recognizing or studying it as a distinct phenomenon.