page_title: Orientalism (book)
section_title: Occidental and Oriental origins
hierarchical_section_title: Orientalism (book) / Overview / Occidental and Oriental origins
caption_attribution_description: This famous canvas, probably painted in the workshop of Gentile Bellini (d. 1507), depicts the Mamluk governor of Damascus granting and audience to some Venetians at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The very exact description of the Mosque of the Omeyyads and Damascan houses in the picture’s background leads us to suppose that the workshop worked on different studies. The emblems depicted – a cup and two gunpowder vessels – belonged to the sultan Qâ’it Bay. But the date the work was finished: 1511, inscribed under the cavalier, situates this embassy under the reign of Qânsûh al-Ghawrî. The characters appear to be the governor Sîbay, and on the Venetian side Nicolò Malipiero, consul to Damascus that year, or perhaps Pietro Zen, whose face we know from one of Titian’s protraits. This considerable character, who fell to disgrace with the Mamluks because he was involved with the Persian shah Ismâ‘îl, had handed in his accreditation letters in 1508. This is perhaps the moment which is set in the painting. (Press "edit" to read more) https://www.qantara-med.org/public/show_document.php?do_id=1156&amp;lang=en
context_page_description: Orientalism is a 1978 book by Edward W. Said, in which the author establishes the eponymous term "Orientalism" as a critical concept to describe the West's common, contemptuous depiction and portrayal of "The East," i.e. the Orient. Societies and peoples of the Orient are those who inhabit the places of Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. Said argues that Orientalism, in the sense of the Western scholarship about the Eastern World, is inextricably tied to the imperialist societies who produced it, which makes much Orientalist work inherently political and servile to power.
  According to Said, in the Middle East, the social, economic, and cultural practices of the ruling Arab elites indicate they are imperial satraps who have internalized a romanticized version of Arab Culture created by French, British and later, American, Orientalists. Examples used in the book include critical analyses of the colonial literature of Joseph Conrad, which conflates a people, a time, and a place into one narrative of an incident and adventure in an exotic land.
context_section_description: Said said that the Western world sought to dominate the Eastern world for more than 2,000 years, since Classical antiquity (8th c. BC – AD 6th c.), the time of the play The Persians (472 BC), by Aeschylus, which celebrates a Greek victory (Battle of Salamis, 480 BC) against the Persians in the course of the Persian Wars (499–449 BC)—imperial conflict between the Greek West and the Persian East. Europe's long, military domination of Asia (empire and hegemony) made unreliable most Western texts about the Eastern world, because of the implicit cultural bias that permeates most Orientalism, which was not recognized by most Western scholars.
  In the course of empire, after the physical-and-political conquest, there followed the intellectual conquest of a people, whereby Western scholars appropriated for themselves (as European intellectual property) the interpretation and translation of Oriental languages, and the critical study of the cultures and histories of the Oriental world. In that way, by using Orientalism as the intellectual norm for cultural judgement, Europeans wrote the history of Asia, and invented the "exotic East" and the "inscrutable Orient", which are cultural representations of peoples and things considered inferior to the peoples and things of the West.
caption: The Reception of the Ambassadors in Damascus (1511) depicts the "Arabic culture" of 16th-century Syria as part of a "romanticized" Orient
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