The origin date of Orientalism is contested among multiple competing candidates

Evidence

Is Orientalism an eternal given? Or was it a discourse that was formed in, say, the early fourteenth century, when the establishment of chairs of Arabic was decreed by the Council of Vienne? Or, say, in the late eighteenth century, when Bonaparte invaded Egypt and his team of savants catalogued the antiquarian and ethnographic details of the land? Or was this perhaps a clash of cultures that went back to pre-Islamic and even pre-Christian times? — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 31

Categorization

• QUESTION: Irwin sets up the book’s central periodization question — when does ‘Orientalism’ as a discourse actually begin?

Related

• Said assigned Orientalism vague origins spanning from classical Greece to the fourteenth century (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalism is chiefly a British and French cultural enterprise (similarity 0.82)
• Major Orientalist scholarship was published in Latin into the twentieth century. (similarity 0.82)
• Early Orientalist guilt contradicts Said’s imperialism thesis (similarity 0.82)
• Early Orientalists codified and domesticated the Orient into a European province of learning. (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalist scholarship cannot be detached from its imperial context (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalism is only the visible tip of a larger modern structure. (similarity 0.80)
• British, French, then American Orientalism follows the rise and fall of colonial empires (similarity 0.79)
• Early Orientalism studied classical texts, not living societies (similarity 0.79)
• Islam was the default framework through which Europe first knew all of the Orient (similarity 0.79)
• Orientalism functions as a systemic structure embedded in the modern project (similarity 0.79)
• Nineteenth-century Orientalism was amateur, aristocratic, and unrefereed (similarity 0.79)
• Nineteenth-century Orientalism framed language study as the evolutionary development of the human mind. (similarity 0.79)
• Orientalism functions as a self-enclosed Western text rather than knowledge of an actual Orient. (similarity 0.79)
• German Orientalists led the field despite Germany having no Arab empire. (similarity 0.79)