 For Said , " the Orient " has been represented since Antiquity in the Western literature , painting and sculpture in the form of stereotypes . As an example , he cites the Greek tragedy The Persians ( 472 BC ) , by Aeschylus , where the protagonist fails and falls because he <unk> the true nature of The East . Contemporarily , Europe has politically dominated Asia to the degree that even the most outwardly objective Western texts about " The Orient " are culturally biased to a degree unrecognized by Western scholars , who appropriated for themselves the intellectual tasks of studying , exploring and interpreting the languages , histories and cultures of the Orient ; thereby implying that such ( subaltern ) peoples were incapable of speaking for themselves , and much less capable of composing their own cultural and historical narratives . Western Orientalists have written Asia 's past — therein constructing the modern identities of Asia — from a perspective that establishes " The West " as the cultural norm to emulate , from which the " exotic and inscrutable " Orientals deviate . 
