tim fulford had been rewarded for his brilliant Orientalist scholarship with the position of judge in the supreme court in Britain’s colony in Bengal Once established there, he began in-depth study of Indian culture that was to transform Orientalism – and Orientalist poetry – irrevocably Having rapidly acquired Sanskrit, Jones had by 1784 made his groundbreaking contribution to philology and anthropology, showing that there was a common Indo-European language family and that Indian civilization and philosophy were sources of the Egyptian and Greek culture to which Europe traced its roots But Jones’s studies were not only linguistic With the Asiatic Society of Bengal, which he founded, he embarked upon a comprehensive assessment of India’s religion, poetry, and natural history This project, published annually in the Asiatick Researches from 1789, opened European eyes to the sophistication of Hindu culture It produced a newly detailed view of India for European readers, a view that did not simply follow the priorities of colonial conquest and administration Jones, that is to say, studied Indian tradition both in order to facilitate colonial rule and because he was delighted by a culture that, in several respects, he thought superior to that of Britain As a consequence, his Orientalism did not merely strengthen imperial authority or solely move the so-called truth about the East to Europe It also put that authority in question, at least implicitly, by asserting the value of Oriental literature as a tradition from which Europeans could learn aesthetic and moral values that they had formerly thought the exclusive legacy of Europe While Jones opened European eyes to India, the French savant Constantin Volney brought Egypt to its attention After the publication of his Les Ruines in 1791, the grandeur of Egyptian antiquity and the vigor of Bedouin culture became objects of attention, so much so that when Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, he took with him a scientific expedition intended to record the manners and monuments of the country Volney’s travels thus helped precipitate a colonial venture with scientific knowledge as one of its aims Poets too were indebted to Volney In Gebir (1796), Walter Savage Landor, following an Oriental tale by Clara Reeve, set a verse romance in a Volneyan Egypt ruled by a despotic court in the grip of superstitious priests Gebir, the hero, is a European colonialist who intends to conquer, only to fall in love with the Egyptian queen Romance overcomes imperial war, until Gebir is killed by priestly wiles A harmonious union of East and West, the poet implies, can occur only after the defeat of Oriental priestcraft and despotism by enlightenment Landor’s poem seemed prophetic in the 1790s because Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt followed hard upon its appearance And it certainly helped develop a genre After Landor, the Oriental romance became the single most popular Romantic form, characteristically handling the interactions of East 186 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008