The Birth of Orientalism by App Urs;

Author:App, Urs;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2010-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

Noah’s Chinese Heirs

When Ramsay wrote his books in the first half of the eighteenth century, a new avenue to humanity’s past had opened up through the study of Chinese. Long before students of Sanskrit began to throw light on Indian antiquities, a number of pioneer Sinologists studied the Chinese “hieroglyphs” and tried to make sense of China’s ancient texts. Though earlier books such as Juan Mendoza’s Historia . . . del gran reyno de la China (1596), Matteo Ricci and Nicolas Trigault’s De Christiana Expeditione (1615), and Alvaro Semedo’s Imperio de la China (1642) had provided some enticing information about Chinese history, language, and religion, it was from the mid-seventeenth century that information about China’s antiquity really began to sink in. In 1662, when Bishop Edward Stillingfleet wrote his Origines sacrae (Sacred Origins), he sensed that the defense of biblical authority entered a new phase. “The disesteem of the Scriptures,” he wrote, “is the decay of religion” (Stillingfleet 1817:1.viii), and he mentioned threats from three main sides:

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