Gobineau’s Orientalist authority rested on amateur credentials

Evidence

Gobineau was not a trained Orientalist and though he had developed a passion for Oriental languages when a teenager in Switzerland, neither his Persian nor his Arabic ever amounted to much. His venture into serious academic territory in the form of an attempted decipherment of the various cuneiform scripts was, as we shall see, a disastrous exercise in self-deception. His observations on Persia were those of a diplomat and man of letters, albeit one with some extremely odd ideas. He loved Persia and was to look back on his time at the Tehran posting as his golden years, but that did not stop him from judging the Persians to be the decadent products of racial intermingling. (If any Persian readers are affronted by this, it may be some consolation for them to know that he had an even lower opinion of the United States in that respect.) — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 303

Categorization

• XREF: Bearsthe point about amateur travellers vs. trained Orientalists that runs through Irwin’s whole book on the field’s rigor.