Early Orientalism studied classical texts, not living societies

Evidence

Academic Orientalists for the most part were interested in the classical period of whatever language or society it was that they studied. Not until quite late in the century, with the single major exception of Napoleon’s Institut d’Égypte, was much attention given to the academic study of the modern, or actual, Orient. Moreover, the Orient studied was a textual universe by and large; the impact of the Orient was made through books and manuscripts, not, as in the impress of Greece on the Renaissance, through mimetic artifacts like sculpture and pottery. Even the rapport between an Orientalist and the Orient was textual, so much so that it is reported of some of the early-nineteenth-century German Orientalists that their first view of an eight-armed Indian statue cured them completely of their Orientalist taste. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 151

Categorization

• XREF: Textual versus material engagement with a culture — echoes the reader’s scaffold on representation and the construction of the Other; also connects to how later Islamophobia discourse inherits a textual Orient.
• DEFINE: Establishes that Orientalism’s default object was the classical textual past, a defining orientation that shapes all later critiques.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 151