Demystifying oriental alterities: Pedro Teixeira and the Early Modern scientificity regarding the Past

Long before the physical and linguistic rediscovery of Oriental Antiquity, during the 19th-century, echoes of its cultures reverberated in Europe, through the knowledge of the Classics and the Old Testament. The Early Modern travellers, who crossed the lands of the Near and Middle East, tried to accommodate those venerable echoes into what they experienced in loco, which more regularly than expected was dissonant. This process constitutes an early form of reception of Antiquity, which broke the frontiers of time. Pedro Teixeira, amongst others, left his impressions regarding present, but more particularly, regarding past Oriental alterities, in an intertwined analysis of both his cultural framework and the local data he came across with. By doing so, he challenged the frontiers of knowledge of his time. Moreover, his thorough analysis displays a scientificity that seldom is manifested in merchants and soldiers, as he was. Thus, we propose to examine his travel accounts, hoping to highlight a case-study of the Portuguese contribution to the deconstruction of some misconceptions about the Oriental alterity.