Oriental studies
Oriental studies is the academic field that studies Near Eastern and Far Eastern societies and cultures, languages, peoples, history and archaeology. In recent years, the subject has often been turned into the newer terms of Middle Eastern studies and Asian studies. Traditional Oriental studies in Europe is today generally focused on the discipline of Islamic studies; the study of China, especially traditional China, is often called sinology. The study of East Asia in general, especially in the United States, is often called East Asian studies.
The European study of the region formerly known as "the Orient" had primarily religious origins, which have remained an important motivation until recent times. That is partly since the Abrahamic religions in Europe originated in the Middle East and because of the rise of Islam in the 7th century. Consequently, there was much interest in the origin of those faiths and of Western culture in general. Learning from medieval Arabic medicine and philosophy and the Greek translations to Arabic was an important factor in the Middle Ages. Linguistic knowledge preceded a wider study of cultures and history, and as Europe began to expand its influence in the region, political, and economic factors, that encouraged growth in its academic study. In the late 18th century, archaeology became a link from the discipline to a wide European public, as artefacts brought back through a variety of means went on display in museums throughout Europe.
According to Edward Said, modern Oriental studies was strongly influenced by imperialistic attitudes and interests as well as by the fascination of Mediterranean and European writers and thinkers for the "exotic East". Captured in images by artists, this was embodied in a repeatedly surfacing theme in the history of ideas in the West called "Orientalism." Since the 20th century, scholars from the region itself have participated on equal terms in the discipline.
History
Before Islam
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 but very imprecise knowledge of most of the world farther east, including the "Seres". However, there was a substantial direct Roman trade with India, unlike that with China, during the Roman Empire.Middle Ages
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 and Greek 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.
There was a vague but increasing knowledge of the complex civilisations of China and of India from which luxury goods 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.
Renaissance to 1800
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. 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. At Cambridge University, there has been a Regius Professor of Hebrew since 1540, and the university's chair in Arabic was founded in about 1643. Oxford followed for Hebrew in 1546. 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. 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, 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", 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.
19th century
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 particularly 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.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, which was the first systematic excavation of the site. The expedition resulted in a pioneering publication, Ninevah and Assyria, which jointly authored by Victor Place and Felix Thomas and was published around 1867. 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 to which the new biological sciences tended to contribute until the end of the Second World War.