In the late 18th century, archaeology became a link from the discipline to a wide European public, as artefacts brought back through a variety of means went on display in museums throughout Europe.
Modern study was influenced by imperialist attitudes and interests and by the fascination for the "exotic" East for Mediterranean and European writers and thinkers, and was captured in images by artists, which is embodied in a repeatedly-surfacing theme in the history of ideas in the West, called "Orientalism."
[2] There was a vague but increasing knowledge of the complex civilisations of China and of India from which luxury goods (notably cotton and silk textiles as well as ceramics) were imported.
[3] A landmark was the publication in Spain in 1514 of the first Polyglot Bible, containing the complete existing texts in Hebrew and Aramaic, in addition to Greek and Latin.
The Enlightenment thinkers characterized aspects of the pagan East as superior to the Christian West in Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes and Voltaire's ironic promotion of Zoroastrianism.
The interest in understanding Islam was fueled partly by economic considerations of the growing trade in the Mediterranean region and by the changing cultural and intellectual climate of the time.
[7] The expedition resulted in a pioneering publication, Ninevah and Assyria, which jointly authored by Victor Place and Felix Thomas and was published around 1867.
[8] New national museums provided a setting for important archaeological finds, most of which were then bought back to Europe, and they put Orientalists in the public spotlight as never before.
Although scholastic study expanded, so did racist attitudes and stereotypes of Asian peoples and cultures, however, which frequently extended to local Jewish and Romani communities since they were also of Oriental origin and widely recognized as such.
Scholarship often was intertwined with prejudicial racist and religious presumptions[9] to which the new biological sciences tended to contribute until the end of the Second World War.
The influence of Orientalism in the sense used by Edward Said in his book of the same name in scholarship on the Middle East was seen to have re-emerged and risen in prevalence again after the end of the Cold War.
It is contended that was partly a response to "a lacuna" in identity politics in international relations generally and within the 'West' particularly, which was brought about by the absence of Soviet communism as a global adversary.
[10] The end of the Cold War caused an era that has been marked by discussions of Islamist terrorism framing views on the extent to which the culture of the Arab world and of Islam is a threat to that of the West.
Such considerations were seen to have occurred in the wider context of the way in which many Western scholars responded to international politics after the Cold War, and they were arguably heightened by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
That particular idea of a fundamental conflict between East and West was first advanced by Bernard Lewis in his article "The Roots of Muslim Rage", which was written in 1990.
"[12] The term Orientalism has come to acquire negative connotations in some quarters and is interpreted to refer to the study of the East by Westerners who are shaped by the attitudes of the era of European imperialism in the 18th and the 19th centuries.
[13] In contrast, the term has also been used by some modern scholars to refer to writers of the colonial era who had pro-Eastern attitudes, as opposed to those who saw nothing of value in non-Western cultures.
The generic concept of Oriental studies has to its opponents lost any use that it may have once had and is perceived as obstructing changes in departmental structures to reflect actual patterns of modern scholarship.
This change of labeling may be correlated in some cases to the fact that sensitivity to the term "Oriental" has been heightened in a more politically correct atmosphere, although it began earlier: Bernard Lewis' own department at Princeton University was renamed a decade before Said wrote his book, a detail that Said gets wrong.