ABSTRACT
This chapter will investigate the initial stage, the establishment of the discipline of Oriental studies at the faculties of philosophy in the first half of the nineteenth century. A central concern is the attempt to discern the reasons why the discipline was established and what were the implications for the constitution of the work within it. Since we are today quite accustomed to asking how we should study the Middle East (e.g., Mitchell 2003, Lockman 2004), one might be tempted to expect that around 1800 somebody raised the question of how the Orient should be studied, and that the answer to that question provided the blueprint for the establishment of the discipline at universities.1 My findings suggest that the question was not raised as such and that the establishment of the discipline was hardly a function of any immediate concern with the Orient. More specifically, I aim to show that the main motivation for studying Oriental languages at the faculty of philosophy can be found in the conceptual developments of (classical) philology and theology, both of which underwent major transformation at the time.
