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( Orientalist)
Oriental studies is the academic field of study that embraces Near Eastern and Far Eastern societies and cultures, languages, peoples, history and archaeology; in recent years the term Asian studies has mostly replaced the older term. European study of the region had primarily religious origins, which has remained an important motivation until recent times. Learning from Arabic medicine and philosophy, and the Arabic translations from Greek, was an important factor in the Middle Ages. Linguistic knowledge preceded a wider study of cultures and history, and as Europe began to encroach upon the region, political and economic factors encouraged growth in academic study. From the late 18th century archaeology became a link from the discipline to a wide European public, as treasures brought back filled new European museums. The modern study was influenced both by Imperialist attitudes and interests, and also the sometimes naive fascination of the exotic East for Mediterranean and European writers and thinkers, captured in images by artists, that is embodied in a repeatedly-surfacing theme in the history of ideas in the West, called "Orientalism". In the last century, scholars from the region itself have participated on equal terms in the discipline, transforming it. The Western world's original distinction between the "West" and the "East" was crystallised in the Greco-Persian Wars of the fifth century BCE, when Athenian historians made a distinction between their "Athenian democracy" and that of the Persian monarchy. An institutional distinction between East and West did not exist as a defined polarity before the Oriens- and Occidens-divided administration of the Emperor Diocletian's Roman Empire at the end of the third century CE, and the division of the Empire into Latin and Greek-speaking portions. The classical world had initimate knowledge of their Ancient Persian neighbours (and usually enemies), but very imprecise knowledge of most of the world further East, including the "Seres" (Chinese). However there was substantial direct Roman trade with India (unlike with China) in the Imperial period. The rise of Islam and Muslim conquests in the seventh century established a sharp opposition, or even a sense of polarity, between medieval European Christendom and the medieval Islamic world (which stretched from the Middle East and Central Asia to North Africa and Andalusia). During the Middle Ages, Muslims were considered the "alien" enemies of Christendom. Popular medieval European knowledge of cultures farther to the East was poor, dependent on the wildly fictionalised travels of Sir John Mandeville and legends of Prester John, although the equally famous, and much longer, account by Marco Polo was a good deal more accurate. Scholarly work was initially very largely linguistic in nature, with primarily a religious focus on understanding both Biblical Hebrew and languages like Syriac with early Christian literature, but also from a wish to understand Greek and Arabic works on medicine, philosophy and science. This effort existed sporadically throughout the Middle Ages, and the "Renaissance of the 12th century" witnessed a particular growth in translations of Arabic texts into Latin, with figures like Constantine the African, who translated 37 books, mostly medical texts, from Arabic to Latin, and Herman of Carinthia, one of the translators of the Qur'an. The earliest translation of the Qur'an into Latin was completed in 1143, although little use was made of it until it was printed in 1543, after which it was translated into other European languages. Gerard of Cremona and others based themselves in Al-Andaluz to take advantage of the Arabic libraries and scholars there. Later, with the Christian Reconquista in full progress, such contacts became rarer in Spain.
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