Early on in Orientalism, Edward Said makes a crucial point about the exteriority of the Orientalist text: the fact that the Orientalist always stands outside and apart from that which he is describing. Considering Aeschylus’s The Persians as an early paradigmatic example, he comments:My analysis of the Orientalist text therefore places emphasis on the evidence, which is by no means invisible, for such representations as representations, not as “natural” depictions of the Orient … The things to look for are style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical and social circumstances, not the correctness of the representation nor its fidelity to some great original.