Martin Mulsow gives a working paper on 'A New Orient. Scholars, Objects, and the quest for Asia'

Where the pioneer scholars of the 17th century had broadened the intellectual horizon out from the study of the Bible by learning Arabic, Armenian, Coptic and Ge’ez, in the early 18th century was a push that went considerably further east, into areas which no longer belonged to the broader compass of Greek antiquity or to the Biblical context – to Persia, Bactria, India, China and the Tatar and Mongol steppes. Largely unnoticed and as it were behind the back of the early German Enlightenment, which had quite different preoccupations, young scholars such as Georg Jacob Kehr and Theophil Siegfried Bayer laboured to discover a new and considerably larger world. Kehr wrote the first monograph on an Islamic coin: a coin of the Mughal emperor Aurengzeb. The expansion by leaps and bounds of the scope of the books giving the Lord’s Prayer in exotic languages – to 60, 80 and then over 100 – is a measure of the rapidity, even explosiveness of the expansion of the horizon. It was to be a further 100 to 150 years before this linguistic explosion was gradually absorbed, and oriental studies, neatly organised into faculties, disciplines and professorial chairs, entered into calmer waters.