A pre-existing European repertoire of Oriental images supplied material for major Western authors

Evidence

In the depths of this Oriental stage stands a prodigious cultural repertoire whose individual items evoke a fabulously rich world: the Sphinx, Cleopatra, Eden, Troy, Sodom and Gomorrah, Astarte, Isis and Osiris, Sheba, Babylon, the Genii, the Magi, Nineveh, Prester John, Mahomet, and dozens more; settings, in some cases names only, half-imagined, half-known; monsters, devils, heroes; terrors, pleasures, desires. The European imagination was nourished extensively from this repertoire: between the Middle Ages and the eighteenth century such major authors as Ariosto, Milton, Marlowe, Tasso, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and the authors of the Chanson de Roland and the Poema del Cid drew on the Orient’s riches for their productions, in ways that sharpened the outlines of imagery, ideas, and figures populating it. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 170

Categorization

• XREF: This repertoire concept feeds the scaffold: representation of the Orient was not neutral description but drew on and sharpened an inherited stock of figures — directly transferable to how later Islamophobic imagery recurs.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 170