The
“Arabick” Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century
England.
The Journal of the American Oriental Society; 1/1/1997; Saliba, George
When people think of the impact of Islamic civilization on the Latin West they usually think of the period of the tenth to twelfth centuries that produced the immense collection of texts (mainly scientific and philosophical) that were translated from Arabic into Latin. The common wisdom is that this period in medieval European history was the main source of fresh knowledge, and thus produced what Charles Haskins called the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century.
The European Renaissance, on the other hand, was supposed to have taken place without any input from the same Islamic civilization that was responsible for the remarkable phenomenon of medieval times and in total isolation from it. Thereafter, what happened in Europe was simply a European affair, and should be studied and interpreted as an indigenous production totally independent of other cultures, most of whose output was by then much inferior to the brilliant results that began to be produced in European countries both south and north of the Alps. This view of European history is more than a century old, and is so common that it does not need any documentation.
Furthermore, because this major outline of European intellectual history is so well entrenched, very few people have taken the time to examine it in any detail, or even dared to question the validity of its inner logic. Even when striking similarities between the intellectual production of Islamic civilization and that of renaissance Europe began to appear, mainly during this century, and in such fields as medicine, astronomy, mathematics, or even literature and philosophy, the main outline was barely shaken, and the specialized research of distinguished scholars continued to be confined to professional journals and never percolated into less specialized literature to reach a wider audience. Who remembers, for example, that in the fifties, some forty years ago, both Marie-Therese d'Alverny and Joseph Schacht, to name only two, had together collected evidence to support the thesis that the discovery of the pulmonary circulation of the blood can first be documented in a thirteenth-century work of Ibn al-Nafis (d. 1288) of Damascus and Cairo, and was later rendered in the Latin texts of the Renaissance by the sixteenth-century physicians Servetus (d. 1553) and Colombo (d. 1559) before it was finally reformulated, with some additions, of course, by Harvey (d. 1657)? Or who remembers the similarities between the methods and mathematical techniques found in the works of astronomers who flourished within Islamic civilization during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and the techniques found in the works of Copernicus (1473-1543), which have been known for more than thirty years now, and are still confined mainly to the most erudite and specialized literature? In both instances, the evidence of transmission is tantalizing, and the methodology used to track influence and transmission seems to be inadequate to settle the issues involved one way or the other. We have no clear evidence, in the traditional sense of evidence, that Michel Servetus, for example, had ever read the works of Ibn al-Nafis directly or indirectly, or that Copernicus had ever read the works of Ibn al-Shatir of Damascus (d. 1375), in spite of the fact that, in both instances, the similarities are remarkable; the possibility of independent discovery is highly unlikely. Such is the picture now, with all its shortcomings and misconceptions.
What the book under review aims to do is to pursue this discussion of the possible contacts between Islamic civilization and Europe by going a step further and focusing on the seventeenth century, where things were happening under the light of history, so to speak, and in England in particular. Here we find, in the age of the Royal Society (with its notoriously rich records of correspondence), and in the two most influential centers of English higher education, Cambridge and Oxford, an express interest, which can be very well documented, in things “Arabick”, as such studies were then known. A reader who is accustomed to the traditional interpretation of European intellectual history will be shocked to find theologians, mathematicians, astronomers, natural philosophers, chemists, travelers, merchants, as well as botanists and physicians, all interested in things “Arabick”, and to discover that a great number of them were earnestly pursuing their study of Arabic right up to the end of the seventeenth century and beyond. What is most striking is that those studies do not seem to have been pursued with the kind of curiosity commonly identified with anthropological or antiquarian research. On the contrary, those involved in “Arabick” studies seem to have been doing so out of a deep concern for the advancement of their fields, this at a time when such tendencies, especially among the natural philosophers, were regarded as being “progressive”.
The focus of the book under review is specifically aimed at the works of these seventeenth-century men (no women emerged, as far as I can tell), and at the motivation behind their activities. In order to do so, Professor Russell has assembled a galaxy of distinguished experts in the various intellectual activities of the period and has asked them to focus on the connections of those seventeenth-century individuals to matters dealing with "Arabick" studies of the time.
All in all, this book comprises fourteen contributions that explore such areas as the background of organized Arabic studies in England in relation to similar activities that had taken place on the continent (surveyed by P. M. Holt); English interest in Arabic-speaking Christians (by Alistair Hamilton); Arabists and linguists in seventeenth-century England and their impact on the “philosophical languages” contemplated at the time (by Vivian Salmon); Edmund Castell and his remarkable attempt to produce a Lexikon Heptaglotton (by H. T. Norris); the history of the most influential press of renaissance Europe, namely, the Medici Press (Rome 1584-1614), and its impact on northern Europe (by Robert Jones); the actual financing and the establishment of Arabic chairs at the most prestigious universities of the time (by Mordechai Feingold); an overview of the distinguished collection of Arabic manuscripts at the Bodleian Library at Oxford from its very inception in 1602 (by Colin Wakefield, who is most involved with that collection); the interest in Arabic learning by members of the then newly founded Royal Society (by M. B. Hall); the most distinguished chapter in English mathematical astronomy as it relates to Islamic astronomy (by Raymond Mercier); the status of Arabic studies within the mathematical circles of the time (by George Molland); the impact of Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan (Philosophicus Autodidactus) on John Locke in particular and on the members of the Society of Friends in general (contributed by the editor herself); the English medical writings and their interest in classical Arabic medicine (by Andrew Wear); the Latin forgeries of “Arabic” alchemical works (by William Neuman); and finally, the “Arabick” background of the coronary flowers of England (by John Harvey).
In addition, these scholars have in their own way explored other areas not directly indicated in the titles of their contribution, all to give an impression that matters “Arabick” touched almost every aspect of English intellectual life during the seventeenth century.
Why was Arabic so important that the attendance at a weekly lecture on it would be required of every student of arts (including medicine) at Oxford, according to the Statutes of the university chancellor, Bishop William Laud (1573-1645)? This during the age of Newton, the Royal Society, and the religious movement that saw the solidification of an independent church of England in opposition to the Roman See, and the establishment of the Society of Friends that is still with us today? As it turns out, each had some interest in matters "Arabick."
Three main reasons for this interest in “Arabick” keep surfacing in these essays with some regularity. First, there was the religious interest. On a mundane political level, Protestant churches, in their fight with the Roman See, sought contacts with the eastern churches that had already succeeded in the same fight some six hundred years earlier. In a sense, the eastern churches were looked at as an example to emulate, for they had their own liturgies, their own hierarchies, and their total independence of the church of Rome - a Protestant dream come true. By the seventeenth century, most of those eastern churches were thoroughly Arabized, that is, they had either translated their liturgy into Arabic or used that language primarily for their theological discourse. Under those circumstances it is not hard to see why the Anglican fathers would be interested in the eastern Orthodox or Coptic churches.
On a more sophisticated level, the same Protestant movement on the continent, with its emphasis on the return to the word of the Bible, had already begun to note the importance of Semitic languages for the study of both the Old and the New Testaments. And Arabic was simply the best preserved and most documented of all those languages. Hebrew scholars themselves had made extensive use of Arabic, even in medieval times, in order to acquire mastery of the Hebrew text. Those examples were not wasted on the learned theologians of the time, and they too began to make use of Arabic for the same purposes. After all, the King James committee for the translation of the Bible included the famous William Bedwell (1563-1632), the father of English Arabists, among its members.
Second, there was definitely a commercial interest. In his attempt to “sell” Arabic to his patrons, the same Arabist, William Bedwell, wrote that in all the Muslim countries “from the Fortune Islands . . . to the extreme east, “the privileges and diplomas of kings and princes, the instruments of contracts of merchants and nobles, finally the familiar letters of all, are expressed and written almost solely in the Arabic language”. Then there was the Levant Company, which was already founded in the latter part of the sixteenth century, with its illustrious history in several parts of the Ottoman Empire. One English Arabist after another either made use of books shipped by that company back to England from the Levant, or took some time from their teaching duties to become chaplains for that company in such places as Aleppo, Syria. This involved commercial activity, and the intimate relations established between the visiting chaplains and the “natives” included a heavy trade in manuscripts, a good number of which formed the core of the major collection of Oxford and Cambridge. But it was the contents of those manuscripts that were of special significance for the fields of study mentioned above.
Finally, there were the secular, scientific reasons to pursue Arabic and other Islamic languages, such as Persian and Turkish. This secular interest in Arabic is nowhere better illustrated than in the case of the English mathematicians and astronomers of the seventeenth century, a chapter of the book so brilliantly written by Raymond Mercier. In the words of one of the leading astronomers of the time, in a letter to Huntington, Edward Bernard (1638-96), an orientalist by inclination who studied mathematics with John Wallis and later became the Savilian professor of astronomy, wrote: “our men conceive that there is some sense and value in the oriental astronomy”. He went on to say: “Many reasonably trust the astronomy of the orientals”. Similar opinions and interests motivated John Greaves (1602-52), the orientalist and astronomer, and the Gresham Professor of Geometry (1630-33), who made a brief trip to Italy in 1635, but left on a longer trip to the East, namely, to Constantinople, Rhodes, Alexandria and Cairo, where he also made observations. After the death of John Bainbridge (1583-1643), Greaves succeeded him as the Savilian professor of astronomy, and at that time read and annotated the Persian work of Ala al-Din al-Quhji (d. 1474) on theoretical astronomy. He seems to have been mainly concerned with celestial distances and magnitudes.
The manner in which these men acquired the Arabic language is one of the most interesting and well-documented episodes in this book. In a curious remark, for example, John Greaves refers to a teacher by the name of Georgio that he had had in Cairo. The others made similar pilgrimages to other countries and centers of learning in order to achieve the same purpose.
But the practice of attaching one's self to a native teacher while traveling in the Orient, or even in Europe for that matter, seems to have been the normal method of acquiring a better grasp of Arabic. Several European Arabists followed this method. To name only a few, we know, for example, that Edward Pocock, the Laudian professor of Arabic, attached himself to al-Darwish Ahmad when Pocock was serving as chaplain of the Levant Company in Aleppo between the years 1630 and 1636. Mathias Pasor (1598-1658), the German orientalist, attached himself to Gabriel Sionita (or Jibrail Sahyuni, 1577-1648) in Paris in order to study Arabic. The same Sionita worked on many Latin translations of Arabic works with his compatriot, the Lebanese Maronite Yuhanna al-Hasruni (Johannes Hesronita, d. 1625). From Egypt, the Copt Yusuf Ibn Abu Dhaqan (Abudacnus, or Barbatus), who came on a mission to Rome in 1595, ended up converting to Catholicism and teaching Arabic at Oxford in 1610. Thomas Erpenius (1584-1624), the Dutch orientalist, is supposed to have studied Arabic with him. But judging from the message that Abu Dhaqan left to the orientalist William Bedwell, now preserved in a manuscript at the Bodleian, this Abu Dhaqan could not have taught much Arabic, for he himself had less than full control of the language.
Another curious phenomenon becomes clear from this book as well, namely, that most of the European orientalists from the Renaissance onward were mostly interested in mathematics and astronomy as well as oriental languages. We have already mentioned John Greaves and Edward Bernard, but we could also mention Bedwell himself, and individuals of the prior generation, such as Guillaume Postel (1510-81) and his student Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609). Similarly we can mention Edmund Halley (1656-1742), of the Halley comet fame, who studied the work of Battani and attempted to correct it, and John Bainbridge (1582-1643), who was appointed as Savile Professor of Astronomy in 1619, and in 1622 began to study Arabic.
All this seems to indicate that the interest in things “Arabick” in seventeenth-century England, and more so in the rest of Europe in the previous century were also motivated by a genuine scientific interest on the part of mathematicians and astronomers. A similar interest was also expressed by physicians and botanists. Even philosophers, like John Locke, as is so well argued by the editor herself, studied Arabic as a student at Oxford, and was apparently quite interested in Arabic philosophical works on the autodidactus when he was writing An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
To conclude, one is left with the impression that all this activity was not at all motivated by the anthropological interest in other cultures. Rather these orientalists seem to have sought the scientific and philosophical Arabic sources out of a genuine interest in the developments in their own academic disciplines. This picture of the European Renaissance - quite different from the one that is commonly seen - is enough reason to recommend this book very strongly to anyone who has an interest in the history of oriental studies, renaissance Europe, or even general intellectual history.
GEORGE SALIBA COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
1997 American Oriental Society
The Journal of the American Oriental Society; 1/1/1997; Saliba, George
When people think of the impact of Islamic civilization on the Latin West they usually think of the period of the tenth to twelfth centuries that produced the immense collection of texts (mainly scientific and philosophical) that were translated from Arabic into Latin. The common wisdom is that this period in medieval European history was the main source of fresh knowledge, and thus produced what Charles Haskins called the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century.
The European Renaissance, on the other hand, was supposed to have taken place without any input from the same Islamic civilization that was responsible for the remarkable phenomenon of medieval times and in total isolation from it. Thereafter, what happened in Europe was simply a European affair, and should be studied and interpreted as an indigenous production totally independent of other cultures, most of whose output was by then much inferior to the brilliant results that began to be produced in European countries both south and north of the Alps. This view of European history is more than a century old, and is so common that it does not need any documentation.
Furthermore, because this major outline of European intellectual history is so well entrenched, very few people have taken the time to examine it in any detail, or even dared to question the validity of its inner logic. Even when striking similarities between the intellectual production of Islamic civilization and that of renaissance Europe began to appear, mainly during this century, and in such fields as medicine, astronomy, mathematics, or even literature and philosophy, the main outline was barely shaken, and the specialized research of distinguished scholars continued to be confined to professional journals and never percolated into less specialized literature to reach a wider audience. Who remembers, for example, that in the fifties, some forty years ago, both Marie-Therese d'Alverny and Joseph Schacht, to name only two, had together collected evidence to support the thesis that the discovery of the pulmonary circulation of the blood can first be documented in a thirteenth-century work of Ibn al-Nafis (d. 1288) of Damascus and Cairo, and was later rendered in the Latin texts of the Renaissance by the sixteenth-century physicians Servetus (d. 1553) and Colombo (d. 1559) before it was finally reformulated, with some additions, of course, by Harvey (d. 1657)? Or who remembers the similarities between the methods and mathematical techniques found in the works of astronomers who flourished within Islamic civilization during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and the techniques found in the works of Copernicus (1473-1543), which have been known for more than thirty years now, and are still confined mainly to the most erudite and specialized literature? In both instances, the evidence of transmission is tantalizing, and the methodology used to track influence and transmission seems to be inadequate to settle the issues involved one way or the other. We have no clear evidence, in the traditional sense of evidence, that Michel Servetus, for example, had ever read the works of Ibn al-Nafis directly or indirectly, or that Copernicus had ever read the works of Ibn al-Shatir of Damascus (d. 1375), in spite of the fact that, in both instances, the similarities are remarkable; the possibility of independent discovery is highly unlikely. Such is the picture now, with all its shortcomings and misconceptions.
What the book under review aims to do is to pursue this discussion of the possible contacts between Islamic civilization and Europe by going a step further and focusing on the seventeenth century, where things were happening under the light of history, so to speak, and in England in particular. Here we find, in the age of the Royal Society (with its notoriously rich records of correspondence), and in the two most influential centers of English higher education, Cambridge and Oxford, an express interest, which can be very well documented, in things “Arabick”, as such studies were then known. A reader who is accustomed to the traditional interpretation of European intellectual history will be shocked to find theologians, mathematicians, astronomers, natural philosophers, chemists, travelers, merchants, as well as botanists and physicians, all interested in things “Arabick”, and to discover that a great number of them were earnestly pursuing their study of Arabic right up to the end of the seventeenth century and beyond. What is most striking is that those studies do not seem to have been pursued with the kind of curiosity commonly identified with anthropological or antiquarian research. On the contrary, those involved in “Arabick” studies seem to have been doing so out of a deep concern for the advancement of their fields, this at a time when such tendencies, especially among the natural philosophers, were regarded as being “progressive”.
The focus of the book under review is specifically aimed at the works of these seventeenth-century men (no women emerged, as far as I can tell), and at the motivation behind their activities. In order to do so, Professor Russell has assembled a galaxy of distinguished experts in the various intellectual activities of the period and has asked them to focus on the connections of those seventeenth-century individuals to matters dealing with "Arabick" studies of the time.
All in all, this book comprises fourteen contributions that explore such areas as the background of organized Arabic studies in England in relation to similar activities that had taken place on the continent (surveyed by P. M. Holt); English interest in Arabic-speaking Christians (by Alistair Hamilton); Arabists and linguists in seventeenth-century England and their impact on the “philosophical languages” contemplated at the time (by Vivian Salmon); Edmund Castell and his remarkable attempt to produce a Lexikon Heptaglotton (by H. T. Norris); the history of the most influential press of renaissance Europe, namely, the Medici Press (Rome 1584-1614), and its impact on northern Europe (by Robert Jones); the actual financing and the establishment of Arabic chairs at the most prestigious universities of the time (by Mordechai Feingold); an overview of the distinguished collection of Arabic manuscripts at the Bodleian Library at Oxford from its very inception in 1602 (by Colin Wakefield, who is most involved with that collection); the interest in Arabic learning by members of the then newly founded Royal Society (by M. B. Hall); the most distinguished chapter in English mathematical astronomy as it relates to Islamic astronomy (by Raymond Mercier); the status of Arabic studies within the mathematical circles of the time (by George Molland); the impact of Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan (Philosophicus Autodidactus) on John Locke in particular and on the members of the Society of Friends in general (contributed by the editor herself); the English medical writings and their interest in classical Arabic medicine (by Andrew Wear); the Latin forgeries of “Arabic” alchemical works (by William Neuman); and finally, the “Arabick” background of the coronary flowers of England (by John Harvey).
In addition, these scholars have in their own way explored other areas not directly indicated in the titles of their contribution, all to give an impression that matters “Arabick” touched almost every aspect of English intellectual life during the seventeenth century.
Why was Arabic so important that the attendance at a weekly lecture on it would be required of every student of arts (including medicine) at Oxford, according to the Statutes of the university chancellor, Bishop William Laud (1573-1645)? This during the age of Newton, the Royal Society, and the religious movement that saw the solidification of an independent church of England in opposition to the Roman See, and the establishment of the Society of Friends that is still with us today? As it turns out, each had some interest in matters "Arabick."
Three main reasons for this interest in “Arabick” keep surfacing in these essays with some regularity. First, there was the religious interest. On a mundane political level, Protestant churches, in their fight with the Roman See, sought contacts with the eastern churches that had already succeeded in the same fight some six hundred years earlier. In a sense, the eastern churches were looked at as an example to emulate, for they had their own liturgies, their own hierarchies, and their total independence of the church of Rome - a Protestant dream come true. By the seventeenth century, most of those eastern churches were thoroughly Arabized, that is, they had either translated their liturgy into Arabic or used that language primarily for their theological discourse. Under those circumstances it is not hard to see why the Anglican fathers would be interested in the eastern Orthodox or Coptic churches.
On a more sophisticated level, the same Protestant movement on the continent, with its emphasis on the return to the word of the Bible, had already begun to note the importance of Semitic languages for the study of both the Old and the New Testaments. And Arabic was simply the best preserved and most documented of all those languages. Hebrew scholars themselves had made extensive use of Arabic, even in medieval times, in order to acquire mastery of the Hebrew text. Those examples were not wasted on the learned theologians of the time, and they too began to make use of Arabic for the same purposes. After all, the King James committee for the translation of the Bible included the famous William Bedwell (1563-1632), the father of English Arabists, among its members.
Second, there was definitely a commercial interest. In his attempt to “sell” Arabic to his patrons, the same Arabist, William Bedwell, wrote that in all the Muslim countries “from the Fortune Islands . . . to the extreme east, “the privileges and diplomas of kings and princes, the instruments of contracts of merchants and nobles, finally the familiar letters of all, are expressed and written almost solely in the Arabic language”. Then there was the Levant Company, which was already founded in the latter part of the sixteenth century, with its illustrious history in several parts of the Ottoman Empire. One English Arabist after another either made use of books shipped by that company back to England from the Levant, or took some time from their teaching duties to become chaplains for that company in such places as Aleppo, Syria. This involved commercial activity, and the intimate relations established between the visiting chaplains and the “natives” included a heavy trade in manuscripts, a good number of which formed the core of the major collection of Oxford and Cambridge. But it was the contents of those manuscripts that were of special significance for the fields of study mentioned above.
Finally, there were the secular, scientific reasons to pursue Arabic and other Islamic languages, such as Persian and Turkish. This secular interest in Arabic is nowhere better illustrated than in the case of the English mathematicians and astronomers of the seventeenth century, a chapter of the book so brilliantly written by Raymond Mercier. In the words of one of the leading astronomers of the time, in a letter to Huntington, Edward Bernard (1638-96), an orientalist by inclination who studied mathematics with John Wallis and later became the Savilian professor of astronomy, wrote: “our men conceive that there is some sense and value in the oriental astronomy”. He went on to say: “Many reasonably trust the astronomy of the orientals”. Similar opinions and interests motivated John Greaves (1602-52), the orientalist and astronomer, and the Gresham Professor of Geometry (1630-33), who made a brief trip to Italy in 1635, but left on a longer trip to the East, namely, to Constantinople, Rhodes, Alexandria and Cairo, where he also made observations. After the death of John Bainbridge (1583-1643), Greaves succeeded him as the Savilian professor of astronomy, and at that time read and annotated the Persian work of Ala al-Din al-Quhji (d. 1474) on theoretical astronomy. He seems to have been mainly concerned with celestial distances and magnitudes.
The manner in which these men acquired the Arabic language is one of the most interesting and well-documented episodes in this book. In a curious remark, for example, John Greaves refers to a teacher by the name of Georgio that he had had in Cairo. The others made similar pilgrimages to other countries and centers of learning in order to achieve the same purpose.
But the practice of attaching one's self to a native teacher while traveling in the Orient, or even in Europe for that matter, seems to have been the normal method of acquiring a better grasp of Arabic. Several European Arabists followed this method. To name only a few, we know, for example, that Edward Pocock, the Laudian professor of Arabic, attached himself to al-Darwish Ahmad when Pocock was serving as chaplain of the Levant Company in Aleppo between the years 1630 and 1636. Mathias Pasor (1598-1658), the German orientalist, attached himself to Gabriel Sionita (or Jibrail Sahyuni, 1577-1648) in Paris in order to study Arabic. The same Sionita worked on many Latin translations of Arabic works with his compatriot, the Lebanese Maronite Yuhanna al-Hasruni (Johannes Hesronita, d. 1625). From Egypt, the Copt Yusuf Ibn Abu Dhaqan (Abudacnus, or Barbatus), who came on a mission to Rome in 1595, ended up converting to Catholicism and teaching Arabic at Oxford in 1610. Thomas Erpenius (1584-1624), the Dutch orientalist, is supposed to have studied Arabic with him. But judging from the message that Abu Dhaqan left to the orientalist William Bedwell, now preserved in a manuscript at the Bodleian, this Abu Dhaqan could not have taught much Arabic, for he himself had less than full control of the language.
Another curious phenomenon becomes clear from this book as well, namely, that most of the European orientalists from the Renaissance onward were mostly interested in mathematics and astronomy as well as oriental languages. We have already mentioned John Greaves and Edward Bernard, but we could also mention Bedwell himself, and individuals of the prior generation, such as Guillaume Postel (1510-81) and his student Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609). Similarly we can mention Edmund Halley (1656-1742), of the Halley comet fame, who studied the work of Battani and attempted to correct it, and John Bainbridge (1582-1643), who was appointed as Savile Professor of Astronomy in 1619, and in 1622 began to study Arabic.
All this seems to indicate that the interest in things “Arabick” in seventeenth-century England, and more so in the rest of Europe in the previous century were also motivated by a genuine scientific interest on the part of mathematicians and astronomers. A similar interest was also expressed by physicians and botanists. Even philosophers, like John Locke, as is so well argued by the editor herself, studied Arabic as a student at Oxford, and was apparently quite interested in Arabic philosophical works on the autodidactus when he was writing An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
To conclude, one is left with the impression that all this activity was not at all motivated by the anthropological interest in other cultures. Rather these orientalists seem to have sought the scientific and philosophical Arabic sources out of a genuine interest in the developments in their own academic disciplines. This picture of the European Renaissance - quite different from the one that is commonly seen - is enough reason to recommend this book very strongly to anyone who has an interest in the history of oriental studies, renaissance Europe, or even general intellectual history.
GEORGE SALIBA COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
1997 American Oriental Society