Anquetil-Duperron

Anquetil-Duperron was an eighteenth-century scholar and traveler whose translations gave European readers access to Asian texts and civilizations beyond the familiar Biblical and Greco-Latin inheritance. In Edward Said’s account, his journey to India and his work on the Avesta widened the intellectual map of Europe: the Orient appeared not merely as a distant expanse, but as a material world of languages, writings, and histories. That opening also had consequences that exceeded Anquetil’s original aims, challenging the Bible’s privileged place as a source for humanity’s remote past.

Identity and intellectual aims

Said describes Anquetil as an eccentric theoretician of egalitarianism who attempted to reconcile Jansenism, orthodox Catholicism, and Brahmanism. He traveled to Asia intending to establish the primitive historical existence of a Chosen People and the truth of Biblical genealogies. The inquiry did not remain within those boundaries: it carried him as far east as Surat, where he encountered Avestan texts and completed a translation of the Avesta.

The account emphasizes a divergence between the traveler’s initial purpose and the intellectual reach of his discoveries. Anquetil set out with Biblical questions, but the material he found enabled comparisons and histories that could not be contained by a Biblical framework. His work thus belongs to a transition in European scholarship: inquiry into the Orient began to move beyond the comparative shelter of the Biblical Orient and toward Asian texts and civilizations in their own right.

Travel and translation

Anquetil’s journey made the encounter with the Orient textual and concrete. In 1759, at Surat, he completed his translation of the Avesta; in 1786, in Paris, he completed a translation of the Upanishads. Taken together, these projects connected Asian intellectual traditions to European scholarship across both travel and translation. Said cites Raymond Schwab’s characterization of Anquetil as a scholar who did not simply inspect the famous Avestan fragment associated with Oxford and return to his studies: he looked, then went to India.

The translations also had effects that Anquetil could not have intended. Schwab’s account stresses the irony that Anquetil and Voltaire, despite their sharp temperamental and ideological opposition, shared an interest in the Orient and the Bible. Anquetil’s discoveries, pursued in part to make Biblical history more secure, helped stimulate criticism of Biblical texts previously regarded as revealed. The result was not simply additional information about Asia; it altered the terms on which European readers could assess inherited religious and historical authority.

A widened intellectual horizon

Said presents the translations as opening a channel between what Schwab calls the hemispheres of human genius. Before Anquetil, the remote past of the world was sought principally in Latin, Greek, Jewish, and Arabic writers; the Bible could appear as an isolated source, while the vastness of other written traditions remained largely unsuspected. Anquetil’s work helped make visible a universe of writing beyond that narrow inheritance, including civilizations and literatures with histories of their own.

This expansion reached into European education. Schools shaped by the Greco-Latin heritage of the Renaissance, much of which had itself been transmitted to Europe by Islam, were confronted with the prospect of innumerable past civilizations and an infinity of literatures. Europe’s provinces, in this account, were no longer the only places whose histories had left a mark. The significance of Anquetil’s translations lies in this change of scale: they made Asian textual traditions evidence for a larger human history, rather than merely distant objects within an existing European one.

From intellectual opening to scholarly classification

Said distinguishes Anquetil’s expansive work from that of William Jones, the second major pre-Napoleonic Orientalist project he discusses. Anquetil opened wide vistas; Jones, by contrast, codified, tabulated, and compared. This contrast does not erase the importance of Jones’s scholarship, but it clarifies the different kinds of intellectual work at stake. Anquetil’s translations unsettled the limits of the inherited archive, while Jones’s investigations gathered and organized knowledge of India within a European scholarly province.

Said places both projects before Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, which he identifies as having far greater consequences for the modern history of Orientalism. Anquetil’s significance within that history is therefore both pioneering and bounded: his travels and translations helped give Asia a precise intellectual and historical dimension, but the subsequent development of Orientalist knowledge would also involve the ordering and domestication of the Orient. The distinction between opening a world of texts and turning that world into an object of European learning is central to Said’s account of Anquetil’s place in the story.