Oriental studies

The original distinction between the "West" and the "East" was crystalized by the Greco-Persian Wars in the 5th century BC, when Athenian historians made a distinction between their "Athenian democracy" and the Persian monarchy. An institutional distinction between East and West did not exist as a defined polarity before the Oriens- and Occidens-divided administration of Roman Emperor Diocletian in the late 3rd century AD, and the division of the Roman Empire into portions that spoke Latin and Greek. The classical world had an intimate knowledge of its Ancient Persian neighbours (and usually enemies) but very imprecise knowledge of most of the world farther east, including the "Seres" (Chinese). However, there was a substantial direct Roman trade with India, unlike that with China, during the Roman Empire.

Hayton of Corycus remits his report on the Mongols to Pope Clement V in 1307.

The spread of Islam and the Muslim conquests in the 7th century established a sharp opposition or even a sense of polarity in the Middle Ages between European Christendom and the Islamic world, which stretched from the Middle East and Central Asia to North Africa and Andalusia. Popular medieval European knowledge of cultures farther east was poor and depended on the widely-fictionalized travels of Sir John Mandeville and the legends of Prester John, but the equally-famous account by Marco Polo was much longer and was more accurate.

Scholarly work was initially largely linguistic in nature, with primarily a religious focus on understanding both Biblical Hebrew and languages like Syriac with early Christian literature, but there was also a wish to understand Arabic works on medicine, philosophy, and science. That effort, also called the Studia Linguarum, existed sporadically throughout the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance of the 12th century witnessed a particular growth in translations of Arabic texts into Latin, with figures like Constantine the African, who translated 37 books, mostly medical texts, from Arabic to Latin, and Herman of Carinthia, one of the translators of the Qur'an. The earliest translation of the Qur'an into Latin was completed in 1143, but little use was made of it until it was printed in 1543. It was later translated into other European languages. Gerard of Cremona and others based themselves in Andalusia to take advantage of its Arabic libraries and scholars. However, as the Christian Reconquista in the Iberian Peninsula began to accelerate in the 11th century, such contacts became rarer in Spain. Chairs of Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic were briefly established at Oxford and in four other universities after the Council of Vienne (1312).[1]

There was a vague but increasing knowledge of the complex civilisations of China and of India from which luxury goods (notably cotton and silk textiles as well as ceramics) were imported. Although the Crusades produced relatively little in the way of scholarly interchange, the eruption of the Mongol Empire had strategic implications for the Crusader kingdoms and for Europe itself, which led to extended diplomatic contacts. During the Age of Exploration, European interest in mapping Asia, especially the sea routes, became intense, but most was pursued outside the universities.

Matteo Ricci (left) and Xu Guangqi (徐光啟) (right) in the Chinese edition of Euclid's Elements (幾何原本) published in 1607

University Oriental studies became systematic during the Renaissance, with the linguistic and religious aspects initially continuing to dominate. There was also a political dimension, as translations for diplomatic purposes were needed even before the West engaged actively with the East beyond the Ottoman Empire.[2] A landmark was the publication in Spain in 1514 of the first Polyglot Bible, containing the complete existing texts in Hebrew and Aramaic, in addition to Greek and Latin.[3]At Cambridge University, there has been a Regius Professor of Hebrew since 1540 (the fifth-oldest regular chair there), and the university's chair in Arabic was founded in about 1643. Oxford followed for Hebrew in 1546 (both chairs were established by Henry VIII). One distinguished scholar was Edmund Castell, who published his Lexicon Heptaglotton Hebraicum, Chaldaicum, Syriacum, Samaritanum, Aethiopicum, Arabicum, et Persicum in 1669, and scholars like Edward Pococke had traveled to the East and wrote on the modern history and society of the Eastern peoples.[4]The University of Salamanca had Professors of Oriental Languages at least in the 1570s. In France, Jean-Baptiste Colbert initiated a training programme for Les jeunes de langues (The Youth of Languages), young linguists in the diplomatic service, like François Pétis de la Croix, who, like his father and his son, served as an Arabic interpreter to the King. The study of the Far East was pioneered by missionaries, especially Matteo Ricci and others during the Jesuit China missions, and missionary motives were to remain important, at least in linguistic studies.

During the 18th century, Western scholars reached a reasonable basic level of understanding of the geography and most of the history of the region, but knowledge of the areas least accessible to Western travelers, like Japan and Tibet, and their languages remained limited. The Enlightenment thinkers characterized aspects of the pagan East as superior to the Christian West in Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes and Voltaire's ironic promotion of Zoroastrianism. Others, like Edward Gibbon, praised the relative religious tolerance of the Middle East over what they considered the intolerant Christian West. Many, including Diderot and Voltaire, praised the high social status of scholarship in Mandarin China.

The Università degli Studi di Napoli "L'Orientale" (English: University of Naples "L'Orientale"), founded in Naples in 1732, is the oldest school of Sinology and Oriental Studies of Continental Europe.

The late 18th century saw the start of a great increase in the study of the archaeology of the period, which was to be an ever-more important aspect of the field in the next century. Egyptology led the way and, as with many other ancient cultures, provide linguists with new material for decipherment and study.

The old building of the Asiatic Society, in Calcutta, founded by William Jones in 1784

With a great increase in knowledge of Asia among Western specialists, the increasing political and economic involvement in the region, and particularly the realization of the existence of close relations between Indian and European languages by William Jones, there emerged more complex intellectual connections between the early history of Eastern and Western cultures. Some of the developments occurred in the context of Franco–British rivalry for the control of India. Liberal economists, such as James Mill, denigrated Eastern civilizations as static and corrupt. Karl Marx, himself of Jewish origin, characterized the Asiatic mode of production as unchanging because of the economic narrowness of village economies and the state's role in production. Oriental despotism was generally regarded in Europe as a major factor in the relative failure of progress of Eastern societies. The study of Islam was particularlt central to the field since most people living in the geographical area that was termed as the Orient were Muslims. The interest in understanding Islam was fueled partly by economic considerations of the growing trade in the Mediterranean region and by the changing cultural and intellectual climate of the time.[5]

During the course of the century, Western archeology spread across the Middle East and Asia, with spectacular results. In the 1850s, for example, the French government was determined to mount large-scale operations in Assyria and Mesopotamia to showcase its dominance in the region. An archaeological team, led by Victor Place, excavated the palace of the Assyrian King Sargon II in Khorsabad (formerly Nineveh), which was the first systematic excavation of the site.[6] The expedition resulted in a pioneering publication, Ninevah and Assyria, which jointly authored by Victor Place and Felix Thomas and was published around 1867.[7] New national museums provided a setting for important archaeological finds, most of which were then bought back to Europe, and they put Orientalists in the public spotlight as never before.

The first serious European studies of Buddhism and Hinduism were by the scholars Eugene Burnouf and Max Müller. The academic study of Islam also developed, and by the mid-19th century, Oriental studies had become a well-established academic discipline in most European countries, especially those with imperial interests in the region. Although scholastic study expanded, so did racist attitudes and stereotypes of Asian peoples and cultures, however, which frequently extended to local Jewish and Romani communities since they were also of Oriental origin and widely recognized as such. Scholarship often was intertwined with prejudicial racist and religious presumptions[8] to which the new biological sciences tended to contribute until the end of the Second World War.

Experts inspecting the Rosetta Stone during the Second International Congress of Orientalists in London, 1874

The participation in academic studies by scholars from the newly-independent nations of the region itself inevitably changed the nature of studies considerably, with the emergence of post-colonial studies and Subaltern Studies. The influence of Orientalism in the sense used by Edward Said in his book of the same name in scholarship on the Middle East was seen to have re-emerged and risen in prevalence again after the end of the Cold War. It is contended that was partly a response to "a lacuna" in identity politics in international relations generally and within the 'West' particularly, which was brought about by the absence of Soviet communism as a global adversary.[9] The end of the Cold War caused an era that has been marked by discussions of Islamist terrorism framing views on the extent to which the culture of the Arab world and of Islam is a threat to that of the West. The essence of the debate reflects a presupposition for which Orientalism has been criticized by the Orient being defined exclusively by Islam. Such considerations were seen to have occurred in the wider context of the way in which many Western scholars responded to international politics after the Cold War, and they were arguably heightened by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.[10]

Symbolic of that type of response to the end of the Cold War was the popularization of the clash of civilizations thesis. That particular idea of a fundamental conflict between East and West was first advanced by Bernard Lewis in his article "The Roots of Muslim Rage", which was written in 1990. Again, that was seen as a way of accounting for new forms and lines of division in international society afyer the Cold War. The clash of civilizations approach involved another characteristic of Orientalist thought: the tendency to see the region as being one homogenous civilization, rather than as comprising various different and diverse cultures and strands. It was an idea that was taken on more famously by Samuel P. Huntington in his 1993 article in Foreign Affairs, "The Clash of Civilizations?"[11]

• American Oriental Society
• Oriental Club of Philadelphia
• Smithsonian Institution, Freer Gallery of Art

• Tōyō Bunko in Tokyo
• Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library in India

• Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences
• Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences
• International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden University

• School of Oriental Studies at Universidad del Salvador, Argentina
• Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago
• American Center for Oriental Research
• The Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University

• The Institute of Oriental Culture at Tokyo University
• Institute for Research in Humanities at the Kyoto University

• Wydział Orientalistyczny UW – Strona Wydziału Orientalistycznego Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego The Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Warsaw
• Asiatica Association, Italy
• Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford
• Oriental Collections at Bulgarian National Library
• Uppsala University in Sweden
• Ancient Indian & Iran Trust, London UK

• Dictionary of the History of Ideas: China in Western Thought and Culture
• John E. Hill, translation in his e-edition of Hou Hanshu
• Edward Said's Splash The impact of Edward Said's book on Middle Eastern studies, by Martin Kramer.
• Frontier Orientalism — an article by Austrian anthropologist Andre Gingrich
• Edward Said and the Production of Knowledge
• Orientalism as a tool of Colonialism
• Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "Oriental Study and Research" . Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.