 For Said, "the Orient" has been represented since Antiquity in the Western literature, painting and sculpture in the form of stereotypes. As an example, he cites the Greek tragedy The Persians (472 BC), by Aeschylus, where the protagonist fails and falls because he misperceived the true nature of The East. Contemporarily, Europe has politically dominated Asia to the degree that even the most outwardly objective Western texts about "The Orient" are culturally biased to a degree unrecognized by Western scholars, who appropriated for themselves the intellectual tasks of studying, exploring and interpreting the languages, histories and cultures of the Orient; thereby implying that such (subaltern) peoples were incapable of speaking for themselves, and much less capable of composing their own cultural and historical narratives. Western Orientalists have written Asia's past — therein constructing the modern identities of Asia — from a perspective that establishes "The West" as the cultural norm to emulate, from which the "exotic and inscrutable" Orientals deviate.
