Orientalism
Orientalism refers to two intellectual trends in the West: the appearance or deliberate cultivation in literature and art of stylistic and aesthetic traits reminiscent of Asian cultures, which began in eighteenth-century Europe; and, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the scholarly study of premodern Asia, especially philology (the study of language and linguistics) and other text-based pursuits, by Europeans and Americans. The fields of anthropology, sociology, and cultural, political, and economic history, insofar as they address Asia, have since been called Orientalist as well.
The First Orientalists
The earliest Orientalists, mostly trained in the Greco-Roman classics, were interested in recovering ancient texts, often seeing this as a way to open a window onto the origins of culture, which was itself a major preoccupation in the nineteenth century. Scholars studied the relationships between ancient languages and cultures and focused attention on religious and legal texts. John Selden (1584–1654), an English legal antiquarian and politician, became a recognized authority on Near Eastern polytheism and Jewish law. The German biblical scholar Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752–1827) challenged pious traditions by showing the common origins of the Bible and other Semitic texts. A. H. Anquetil-Duperron (1731–1805), a French scholar, brought Zoroastrian manuscripts to France in the early 1760s.
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