The Orient was historically subdivided into familiar and novel realms

Evidence

From at least the second century B.C. on, it was lost on no traveler or eastward-looking and ambitious Western potentate that Herodotus—historian, traveler, inexhaustibly curious chronicler—and Alexander—king warrior, scientific conqueror—had been in the Orient before. The Orient was therefore subdivided into realms previously known, visited, conquered, by Herodotus and Alexander as well as their epigones, and those realms not previously known, visited, conquered. Christianity completed the setting up of main intra-Oriental spheres: there was a Near Orient and a Far Orient, a familiar Orient, which René Grousset calls “l’empire du Levant,” and a novel Orient. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 161

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the internal taxonomy of the Orient (familiar vs. novel, Near vs. Far) as a mode of classification.
• XREF: Connects to colonial psychology’s framing of the colonized as an already-known, pre-mapped space; resonates with the later Islamophobia readings on how prior Western knowledge pre-figures the Orient.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 161