His racial theories were principally put forward in the Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (1853-55), but he was also famous also for his fictions, including Les Pléiades (1874) and Nouvelles Asiatiques (1876).Footnote ³ As the client, correspondent and advisor of the foreign minister and famous political theorist, Alexis de Tocqueville, he has some claims on the interest of modern historians. But Gobineau also wished to be thought of as an Orientalist. He haunted the Société Asiatique and he wrote extensively on Persian culture as well as on the decipherment of cuneiform.Footnote ⁴

His passion for the Orient developed early, while he was still a schoolboy at the Collège de Bienne in Switzerland. The Baronne de Saint Martin recalled that “All his aspirations were towards the East. He dreamt only of mosques and minarets; he called himself a Muslim, ready to make his pilgrimage to Mecca”.Footnote ⁵ He had a youthful enthusiasm for Firdawsī and oriental storytelling. He read the Mille et une nuits and Antoine Galland's prose helped form Gobineau's old-fashioned literary style. He also steeped himself in the Romantics - Scott, Chateaubriand, Hugo, Gautier, Byron and Nerval. Young Gobineau had turned himself into what the French term ‘un orientaliste de pacotille’. There was a story that Gobineau had taught himself several Oriental languages, including Sanskrit, Arabic and Zend, while still a schoolboy, but this seems to have been only a story and as we shall see, he was never able to acquire full mastery of any Oriental language.

However, the passion for Eastern things persisted and in the years 1835-49 he got to know several Orientalists, including Quatremère, Reinaud and, most crucially, Jules Mohl; he sat in on their lectures and in 1852 joined the Société Asiatique (founded in 1823). In 1849 he became the chef du cabinet of the French Foreign Minister, Alexis de Tocqueville.

The Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (2 vols, Paris, 1853–5) is one of Gobineau's earliest publications. It should not be read as a scientific treatise and perhaps not even as a pseudo-scientific treatise. It can be read as sombre aristocratic romance that owes a lot to the equally gloomy novels of Chateaubriand. More generally, the boundaries between fact and fiction in the life and writings of Gobineau are by no means as firm as might have been expected. One possible source for the Essai should be mentioned here. Gobineau thought Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1824) the best book ever written on the Asiatic temperament and James Morier's light fiction may well have had a role in forming Gobineau's racial ideas. This is not the place to explore the Essai systematically. But it may be useful to sketch out those elements that helped shape his understanding and presentation of the Persians and other Eastern peoples. Gobineau believed in racial inequality. In this I do not think that he differed from most people who lived in the nineteenth century. What was unusual was his gloomy belief in the doom of mankind. He offered an idiosyncratic variation of the Twilight of the Gods that begins with the destruction of the Gods and ends with the twilight of the dwarfs. Humanity's best days were already behind it. “Nations, or rather human herds, oppressed beneath a mournful somnolence, will thenceforth live benumbed in their nullity, like buffalo grazing in the stagnant waters of the Pontine marshes”.Footnote ⁶ The Aryan race and all other races were degenerating – this degeneracy being the result of racial admixture. There was nothing triumphalist or imperialist about Gobineau's racism. The Essai was a way of commemorating a lost Valhalla of Aryan heroes. Conquering dynasties or races such as the Sasanians, the Russians or, more recently, the French were fated to be corrupted by the races that they had conquered and colonised.

As for the Persians, Gobineau classed them as Aryans, which, of course, was mostly what they were. But, whereas most nineteenth-century scholars who worked on the comparison of races and language traced the Indo-Aryan group of races and languages to Indian and Sanskrit origins, Gobineau believed that the Persians originated in Central Asia. The originally heroic status of the Aryan Persians was attested to by various well-known medieval Persian heroic epics – romances which Gobineau tended to read as if they were sober historical chronicles. The most beautiful people were those closest to the Aryans – that is to say the Indians and Persians (even though their stock had degenerated). The bloodstock of the Persians was eventually ruined by admixture with that of the Semitic Assyrians and Arabs.

Gobineau regarded the Arabs as being of mixed stock, partly descended from Ham and partly from Shem. (Gobineau's belief in Noah and his progeny is an example of his romantic literalism.) Since the Jews had ceased to live in Palestine, “Naboth's vineyard has been invaded by the desert and the bramble flourishes in the place where stood the palace of Ahab”.Footnote ⁷ Unlike racists who came after him, Gobineau had a high regard for the Jews, as he approved of the way they tended to keep themselves racially separate. But he thought less highly of the Arabs. “We harry and destroy the Arabs, but we do not succeed in changing them . . .”Footnote ⁸ “It was thus that Islam came forth from the desert. Arrogant, uninventive, and with a civilization that was already for the most part Greco-Asiatic, it found the ground prepared for it”.Footnote ⁹ It was an arid Semitic culture that the Muslims imposed on the Persians. The grand sweep of Gobineau's racial interpretation of history was in part an attempted refutation of Montesquieu's argument that climate exercised a determining influence on culture and that the softness of Asia was the product of a warm climate conducive to easy living.

In 1855 he secured a diplomatic posting and left for Persia as first secretary with M. Bourrée's mission whose aim was to re-establish French diplomatic and commercial relations with Persia and to counteract Russian influence at the court of Nāṣir al-Dīn Shāh. In 1856 Gobineau became chargé d'affaires in Teheran. His duties were not onerous and he busied himself in researching Persian history and he started to study cuneiform. He learnt some Persian, though not necessarily very much more than kitchen Persian. This was his wild enquiring youth (a little like Washington Irving's enchanted episode within the walls of the Alhambra, or Edward Granville Browne's year among the Persians). Gobineau was never to be so happy again as he had been in Persia.

Even so, he was critical of Persia and the Persians. He was shocked by Persia's racial admixture and by the amount of democracy. Only Gobineau could have classified Qājār Iran in the 1850s as being too democratic. Persia's tragedy was, he thought, that it was a land without racial prejudice and he was shocked that Persians regarded Blacks as equals. But Europeans were destined to become like Persians, for they “are rascals who are near enough our cousins . . . This what we shall become tomorrow”.Footnote ¹⁰ But Persia's greatness was all in the past - a past that would become Europe's future. “Nothing great, nothing tragic has happened here . . . since the time of Herodotus”.Footnote ¹¹ Persia was destined to be dominated by the West, but, in accordance with the Gobinian style of thinking, that very dominance would corrupt the West. Gobineau was also shocked by what he characterised as the Oriental mentality, which was incapable of working through logical deductions. Therefore he spent time with a Jew Lalazar (of whom we shall hear more) translating Descartes's Discours sur la méthode, in order to give the Persians some idea of what they were missing.Footnote ¹² During his first sojourn in Persia, he produced Mémoire sur l’état social de la Perse actuelle (Paris, 1856), a short treatise which, despite its title, is actually about Persia's past. Gobineau had a backward cast of mind and believed that past achievements, rather than future potential, were what made a race or culture great.

After his return to France in 1858 he published Trois ans en Asie (Paris, 1859). Everywhere he had been in Persia, he had tended to see ruins. Nineteenth-century Persia was a ghost of what it had formerly been. But, like so much of what was written in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries about the Islamic lands, the book was really a critique of Europe, for the parlous state of contemporary Persia foreshadowed Europe's future. He subsequently returned to Persia to serve as the French minister there from 1861 to 1863. Like E.G. Browne after him, he was much preoccupied with the Russian threat to Persia. During his second visit, he lived like an ascetic and, in his spare time, which again seems to have been considerable, he contemplated Chaldean mysteries.

Les religions et les philosophies dans l'Asie centrale (1865) was written while Gobineau was serving as a diplomat in Athens (1864-8). It repeated and expanded on much of what had already been said in Trois Ans. But his interest in ancient scripts had by now deepened and turned into a kind of obsession, and the deranged theories of the Traité des écritures cunéiformes (on which more shortly) fed into Religions et philosophies and played some part in structuring it. The opening line of Religions et philosophies was “Everything we think, and all the ways we think, have their origin in Asia”.Footnote ¹³ Here Gobineau was following Voltaire, Schopenhauer, Burnouf and others in emphasising Europe's cultural debt to the Aryans of India and to the East more generally. What Gobineau saw tended to be what he had read. The influence of Aeschylus's account in his play The Persians of the defeat of Xerxes's mighty army had made a particularly deep impression on Gobineau, though he was bitter about the ‘accidental’ Greek victories over the Persians.

As Martin Bernal has rightly observed, Gobineau's grand historical vision was an uneasy “hybrid of the Bible and the new Indo-Europeanism”.Footnote ¹⁴ The three sons of Noah set off from Central Asia. Ham and the Hamites and Shem and the Semites left the mythical homeland early in history and fell prey to miscegenation, but the Aryan progeny of Japeth were the last to leave this realm of mythical purity and the last to become racially corrupted. Like so many nineteenth-century thinkers, Gobineau was a diffusionist, but he differed from almost all his contemporaries in placing the origins of the Indo-Aryans in Central Asia rather than in India. India was, in his eyes, a late recipient of a hypothetical Aryan immigration from the North.

Gobineau had a metaphysical cast of mind and contemplating the ideological chaos of Asia gave him “un certain plaisir”. He argued that the original Persians had professed a natural religion, but then their conquests brought them in touch with Semitic monotheism. Note that the Persians had been contaminated by the Semitic race centuries before being conquered by the Semitic Arabs. But the coming of the Arabs and Islam made things even worse. In the Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines, Gobineau had written: “Muhammad invented the religion that was best fitted for the mental state of his people, where idolatry found many followers but where Christianity, distorted by heretics and Judaizers, made just as many proselytes”.Footnote ¹⁵ Islam was, like Buddhism, a religion of moral decay.

Gobineau was the first to espouse the notion that Shi‛ism was the revolt of the Aryan Persians against the Islamic Semites, an expression of the Persian national spirit and of Persian supernaturalism and a rejection of pure monotheism. Like many of his contemporaries, Gobineau believed erroneously in the idea that Shi‛ism was restricted to Iran. He also believed that in Shi‛ism ‛Alī took precedence over Muḥammad, which is theologically incorrect, though it is easy to understand how he might have formed such an impression from talking to certain Shi‛ites. Although he was enthusiastic about Persian history, he did not have much grip on its realities and he had failed to understand that Shi‛ism only became a majority religion under the Safavids. A further strange feature of his version of Shi‛ism is that he believed that some Shī‛īs maintained that the hidden Imam was an illusion and that this doctrine derived from the Hindu concept of Maya.

In Gobineau's perception, Persians often had a somewhat cynical approach to Islam and paid only lip service to its tenets. This particularly applied to the Sufis, whom he described as “a group whose highly philosophical opinions vacillate between ecstasy and atheism”. He stated that “Persian Sufis are of a philosophical disposition in that they accept no positive religion”, and according to him some Sufis venerated Voltaire. Quite a few of them rejected Islam as unworthy of an enlightened soul.Footnote ¹⁶ At other times Gobineau, who was most certainly not a systematic thinker, chose to present Sufism as not so much disguised atheism but rather an Aryan pantheism that was in opposition to the arid Semitic Islam. Sufism, according to Gobineau, was a purely urban cult.

Part of the problem was that Gobineau's direct acquaintance with Sufis seems to have been slight. Much of his information on the subject was derived from the Teherani Jewish occultist, Rabbi Molla Lalazar Hamadani. Books found in Western libraries also shaped Gobineau's portrait of the Sufis. He was not the first to guess that Sufis really had no religion at all. His friend Ernest Renan (the philologist and writer who wrote about everything under the sun and who was a much more famous figure than Gobineau) similarly argued that Sufism, like philosophy and metaphysics, was alien to the Arab soul and was introduced into Islam by Persians, Indians, Berbers and other non-Arabs. In a sense, then, Sufism was not really Islamic at all. Renan believed that Sufism, like Islam more generally and like Christianity too, for that matter, was doomed to give way to science and rationalism. Gobineau's ideas were clearly echoed in Edward Palmer's Oriental Mysticism: A Treatise on the Sufistic and Unitarian Philosophy of the Persians (Cambridge, 1867). The idea that Sufism was some kind of Persian Shu‘ubism was highly influential and still lingered in the twentieth century.

One should not make too much of these criticisms of Gobineau. Part of his problem was that he came on early. He was one of the first after Silvestre de Sacy and Von Hammer to attempt to present a map of the various sects. For example, he was the first to give a substantial account of the Ahl-i Ḥaqq. He wrote about it in Trois ans after having met a representative of the sect in Teheran.Footnote ¹⁷ He gave full weight to the sect's elaborate philosophy – perhaps even too much weight. In the following century, the distinguished scholar Vladimir Minorsky saluted Gobineau's achievements, though the praise, in “Notes sur la secte d'Ahlé-Haqq”, is a trifle barbed: “Le comte de Gobineau, le premier, donna des doctrines de cette culte un exposé d'ensemble remarquable. Plus on étudie la religion des Ahlé-Haqq, plus on se rend compte de la grande valeur des sources où cet illustre écrivain et voyageur puisait ses renseignements. Pourtant le regret qu'on éprouve en lisant Trois ans en Asie, c'est qu'aucun document, aucun texte authentique n'y soit cité. On est reduit à croire sur parole l'auteur que son esprit philosophique porte parfois à donner à son exposé une forme trop systematisée”.Footnote ¹⁸ And indeed at several points in his article Minorsky observed that members of the Ahl-i Ḥaqq sect that he had met in Western Iran seemed to have a less sophisticated theology than that attributed to them by Gobineau.

Gobineau also tackled the Nuṣayrīs whose cult he eccentrically decided descended from Buddhism.Footnote ¹⁹ In addition, and most importantly, he was one of the very first to give an account of the Bābīs and the horrific persecutions that they experienced. As for Babist doctrines, his version of these was confused and ambivalent though certainly vivid and enthusiastic. More than half of Religions and philosophies was devoted to the history and teaching of the Bābīs.Footnote ²⁰ Sometimes he seems to have regarded Babist doctrine as a kind of Gobinism. Or perhaps rather a utopian form of communism. Or a revival of Chaldeanism and Gnosticism

It is clear that Gobineau's Persian was so-so and his Arabic worse. In a letter to de Tocqueville in 1859 he confessed that he found Persian writings with lots of Arabic in them extremely difficult.Footnote ²¹ Gobineau's chief importance lies in the fact that he was a pioneer in various aspects of Persian studies and in the inspiration he gave to others who came after him, such as Minorsky, and, above all too, to that mighty scholar and confirmed trouble-maker, Edward Granville Browne.Footnote ²² Browne read Gobineau at an early age and was profoundly moved by the account of the sufferings of the Bābīs. Throughout his life Browne would continue to praise the writings of Gobineau. In A Literary History of Persia, he described Religions et philosophies as “incomparable” and said that it “combines wit, sympathy and insight to an extraordinary degree. . .” “I personally owe more to this book than to any other book about Persia, since to it, not less than to an equally fortuitous meeting in Isfahan, I am indebted for that unravelling of Babi doctrine and history which first won for me a reputation in Oriental scholarship”.Footnote ²³ But Browne was not an uncritical fan, and, for example, he commented how Gobineau had misunderstood the doctrines of Mullā Ṣadrā, making him out to be an Avicennist when the reverse was true. Here Browne also corrected errors in Gobineau's Arabic.Footnote ²⁴ Nevertheless, it is not clear that Browne was right and Gobineau was wrong in thinking that Mullā Ṣadrā, who wrote a commentary on Avicenna's Shifā’, was indeed part of the Avicennist philosophical tradition.

As long as he confined his researches and writings to the broad outlines of Persian society and spirituality, it was easy for Gobineau to be taken for an expert in Persian studies, because who else was there? Only with the appointment of Edward Granville Browne to a teaching post in Cambridge in 1888 was the study and teaching of Persian put on a firm footing in Britain. As for France, in general, its Orientalists took more interest in dead cultures than living ones and a riffle through the pages of the Journal Asiatique suggests that the gentlemen of the Société Asiatique were more interested in China and India than they were in the Middle East. As we shall see, only in the fields of Middle Eastern archaeology and cuneiform studies was there a guild of scholars who could call out bluffers and amateurs. Thanks largely to the inspiring teaching of Silvestre de Sacy, there were many more Persianists in France than in England, though they tended to concentrate on translations of classic literary works by Firdawsī, ‛Aṭṭār, Ḥāfiẓ, and others. The study of contemporary Iran does not seem to have been thought of as a proper province of Orientalism. But of the cluster of Persianists in Paris there was one who was to play a large part in Gobineau's life. This was Jules Mohl (1800-76), whose translation of Firdawsī’s Shāhnāma was published with a subsidy from the French government, in a series of luxuriously printed volumes, over a long period of years. Mohl was, for a long time, the key figure in the Société Asiatique and he was one of Gobineau's friends, though, like De Tocqueville and Renan, he was not an uncritical one.Footnote ²⁵

In particular, Mohl and Gobineau disagreed and came close to falling out very badly over the issue of cuneiform and its decipherment. Gobineau produced two works of linguistic pseudo-scholarship in this area, Lectures des textes cunéiformes (Paris, 1858) and Traité des écritures cunéiformes (Paris, 2 vols, 1864). The first treatise is wrong-headed, yet still this side of sanity; the second later and much longer work shows many signs of the kind of derangement that is likely to infect those who interest themselves too closely in the study of occultism. The real groundwork involved in the complex business of deciphering the various forms of cuneiform had been done more or less simultaneously by Georg Friedrich Grotenfeld and Henry C. Rawlinson. They used orthodox cryptoanalytic techniques and published their findings in the 1830s. Though Grotenfeld made mistakes, he was on the right lines and his conclusions were broadly compatible with those of Rawlinson. Then Rasmus Rask, following on from Grotenfeld's work, produced a fuller account of the Old Persian language. Rask established that Avestan was close to Sanskrit. Rawlinson, who worked on the rock face of Behistun, had identified more letters than Grotenfeld and found the key for the future decipherment of Akkadian (the language of Babylonia and Assyria). He correctly deduced that Akkadian was part syllabic and part logographic. Decipherment was difficult because of the Akkadian deployment of polyphonous symbols. Early on, Ernest Renan, a leading Semiticist, expressed doubts about what the cuneiform specialists were up to. Indeed, the solution they proposed was so complicated that in 1857 doubters at the Royal Asiatic Society imposed on four of the leading proponents of this sort of decipherment a sealed envelope test of an inscription of Tiglath Pileser I. There was some surprise and much relief when the four experts produced translations that were broadly in line with one another. By the second half of the nineteenth century, a scholarly consensus had been established regarding the essential elements of Old Persian, Elamitic and Assyrian (or Akkadian).Footnote ²⁶

But Gobineau never accepted what from then on became the consensus of scholarly Orientalism.Footnote ²⁷ His early doubts about the Assyriologists were expressed in his Lecture des textes cunéiformes (Paris, 1858). One of the eccentric premises that he worked from was that the languages that were spoken in nineteenth-century Persia were the ones that had been always spoken in Persia. He argued that these languages were difficult to render consistently in the cuneiform and that therefore there was a fair bit of variation in the way in which the various letters were rendered. This flexible mode of interpretation evidently facilitated the readings that he proposed. What made the would-be scholar's life even easier was that every word could be read backwards and forwards and each word had at least four meanings. In the Lecture he also argued that cursive script predated cuneiform and that the latter was a Persian invention that was still in use as late as the third century ad. The best that can be said for this idea is that at least it was original.

Gobineau's proposed alternative to Rawlinson's findings was received by the Orientalist community with hostility and, in a letter to de Tocqueville, Gobineau claimed that the savants were banding together and trying to kill his book by silence. Eventually a serious expert on cuneiform, Jules Oppert, did trouble to reply to and refute Gobineau's conclusions in a manner that Gobineau found insulting.Footnote ²⁸ He then tried sending an article to the Journal Asiatique. This the editors sat on for three months before returning it on the grounds that it was so absurd as to be unpublishable. He appealed to his friend, Mohl, who agreed to look at the manuscript. Gobineau fumed and waited. The article was never published. As he wrote to De Tocqueville, how could his method of decipherment be wrong when it resulted in such fine pieces of Arabic rhymed prose relating to historical events as narrated in Herodotus's History? All Gobineau needed was a good Arabist to help him with the details of the reading.

Though Gobineau's first attempt on cuneiform was eccentric, after he returned to Teheran his ideas grew wilder. The Traité des écritures cunéiformes (2 vols, Paris, 1864) is a monument to learned madness. He wrote to his friend, the Austrian diplomat and Egyptologist, Prokesch-Osten, that his work on this treatise took eight years of his life. He considered it to be his magnum opus. Gobineau began the Traité by considering the inscriptions of Khursabad. Khursabad, also known as Dur-Sharrukin, north-east of Mosul, was first excavated by Paul Emile Botta, the French consul in Mosul. Khursabad was capital city of Sargon II of Assyria and founded in 717 bc. But Gobineau declared that there was no reason to think that the ruins were Assyrian. They were probably built by Darius or one of his successors (and so in the fifth century bc). Leaping from one improbability to another, he next decided that the language of the inscriptions could only be a dialect of Arabic, as Arabic was the language of the Mosul area from time immemorial (wrong again). As for Assyrian, it could, he thought, be reconstructed from fragments in the Book of Ezra. He decided that he was looking at a straightforward twenty-two-letter alphabet (like the Arabic alphabet). Having got so much so very wrong, it was rich of him to describe Grotenfeld as “laborious”. He also expressed contempt for Benfey and his “supposed” decipherment of Bactrian. He thought it astonishing that such eminent men should allow themselves to be seduced by such fantasies. He decided that type one texts were Persian or Zend, whereas type two texts were Huzarwesh, a mixture of Arabic and Zand, that was the mongrel spoken language of the Zagros Mountain region. (More correctly, Huzva‘rish is a mixture of Pahlavi and Aramaic.Footnote ²⁹ )

In volume two, things got stranger yet. Since “ Toute l'Asie est talismanique ”, it could only be that the inscriptions taught a divine philosophy and the grammar of cuneiform was a kind of expression of theology. The function of the cuneiform was to offer Khursabad, Persepolis and other places talismanic protection. In this volume he also discussed the Asiatic cabalistic tradition and its influence on Europe more generally. He discussed the occult alphabets of the Arabs and referred to pseudo-Ibn Waḥshiyya, a fascinating though enigmatic figure, who among other things had produced a treatise on magic alphabets that had been translated by Von Hammer.Footnote ³⁰ The stuffy Parisian Orientalists, he thought, needed to recognise the importance of Cabalism in the Orient. For example, he alleged that the Qur'an contained numerological messages. Because of European culture's contacts with Islam, Europe had become infested with Chaldeanism and Chaldean magic. Chaldeanism was his vague term for ancient Semitic mysteries and it was the source of the cabala and European secret societies.

Part of the trouble may have been Gobineau's lengthy immersion in the doctrines and rituals of Babism, as the Bāb had been keen on talismans and numerology featured largely in Babism. Gobineau obviously considered that initiation, rather than careful scholarly study, was the key to understanding the mysteries of the Orient. He relied on the transcriptions of others and does not seem to have visited the relevant sites. (Those places were so remote that he thought it absurd to suppose that historical records had been carved there.) He preferred to draw on his extensive knowledge of world literature and, above all, he relied on the unreliable assistance of two Teherani occultists, the Jew Lalazar Hamadani (who has already been mentioned) and Hajj Refy Tebéssi and with them he thought he had deciphered cuneiform of the second type.

According to Botta, who did know the sites, Gobineau's ideas were not worth discussing in detail and he declared that he had only criticised Gobineau's book in order to prove that he had read it.Footnote ³¹ But Botta, having savaged the botched reading of cuneiform, did go on to attest to the value of Gobineau's account of the character and philosophy of Oriental peoples. In his report to the Société Asiatique for the scholarly year 1858–9, Mohl had given a fairly neutral and vague account of Gobineau's ideas, merely noting in conclusion that Gobineau had not yet published the method by which he arrived at his readings.Footnote ³² But in the report of 1863–4 Mohl noted how Gobineau's ideas for reading Assyrian were completely at odds with those of Botta. (Botta had deduced around 600 or 700 letters, Gobineau had just 22.) Though Mohl had tried to act as mediator in these matters, he was now obliged to come off the fence and in this report he pointed out the improbabilities in Gobineau's thesis. He admired the artistry of Gobineau's interpretations, but not their accuracy.Footnote ³³ The latter believed that the numerous texts discovered in Iraq and elsewhere were in reality just one, an invocation to God, composed according to a strict alliterative system. Moreover the holy inscription, when read backwards, turned into a curse and each word in the inscription corresponded to Arabic words, one favourable, the other unfavourable. Additionally, numerology was used to conjure the names of kings that his proposed reading could not otherwise provide. Cuneiform was just one large talismanic system. Mohl judged that all this lacked the necessary scholarly rigour and he thought that a hypothetical alphabet that had 50 forms for the same letter was a bit incredible. Gobineau, for his part reproached Mohl for having spent all his life in “the cage of the Orientalists”.Footnote ³⁴ Edward Granville Browne was to dismiss such ideas of Gobineau in the following terms: “Nor need the wild theories propounded by M. le Comte de Gobineau in his Traité des écritures cuneiformes. . . detain us even for a moment”.Footnote ³⁵ Gobineau spent his later years vainly knocking on the doors of orthodox, institutionalised Orientalism.

Although Trois ans and Religions et philosophies certainly had value as pioneering explorations of Persian society and sectarianism, the same cannot be said of the Histoire des Perses.Footnote ³⁶ In this book, history is poorly distinguished from legend. Indeed Gobineau put his story together chiefly from epics and legends especially the Kosh-nāma, a twelfth-century heroic verse epic that tells the story of two kings of China who were contemporary with the fabulous Farīdūn, but he, of course, also drew on the Shāhnāma. So the story began with the Aryans descending from the highlands of Central Asia to find Persia inhabited by a race of giants, later commemorated in Persian literature as the Diws (as in Firdawsī). Gobineau's attempt to reconcile Persian legends with Greek and Biblical chronology had been anticipated by Sir John Malcolm in his History of Persia. The latter, though a little more hard-headed than Gobineau, had found himself reluctant to jettison all of the abundant material furnished by the medieval Persian epics: “If we desire to be fully informed of a nation's history, we must not reject the fables under which the few remaining traces of its origin are concealed”.Footnote ³⁷

Malcolm was the first to reinterpret the Dīws as barbarians and magicians who were the ancient enemies of Persians. Moreover, Malcolm, before Gobineau, was inclined to treat the Shāhnāma’s monstrous ogre, Ḍaḥḥāk (Zohak) as a historical personage. Ḍaḥḥāk, Malcolm decided, was an Assyrian prince who had conquered Persia, after Jamshīd had alienated his subjects by declaring himself a deity. The vile man-eating snakes that grew out of Ḍaḥḥāk's shoulders must have been cancers and his thousand-year reign should be reinterpreted as the duration of Assyrian rule in Persia until the revolt of the blacksmith Kāwa and the enthronement of Farīdūn. Farīdūn was to be identified with the Mede, Arbaces, as he appeared in Classical writings. Similarly Siyāwush was Cambyses.Footnote ³⁸ This kind of euhemerism pervaded the early sections of Malcolm's History, but, as he himself was aware, prior to the decipherment of cuneiform, any attempt to get the chronology of ancient Persia right floated on a sea of uncertainties.

Even after the Dīws had been dealt with, Gobineau's Histoire des Perses hardly became more factual, as Gobineau chronicled the way that Cyrus directed the racial migrations that led to the grandeur of medieval Europe. Gobineau was also very fond of Herodotus and from Herodotus he built up a heroic portrait of Darius. Then Gobineau went on to lament the destruction of an imaginary old Persian feudal culture by the Assyrians who were centralising Semites. This process was continued by the Sasanians, whom he arbitrarily classified as Semites. The real history of Aryan Iran came to an end the day Ardashīr took the throne. Gobineau brought his history to an early end with the declaration that “I stop at the point when a close kinship between us and the dominators of Iran ceased to exist”.Footnote ³⁹ Persia's past was a presage of Europe's future – a kind of historiographical memento mori. His old friend Renan reviewed the book for the Journal Asiatique and, as politely as he could, he pronounced it to be rubbish. He observed that Gobineau's methodology was defective, since using the Shāhnāma as a source on the early history of Persia was like using the Chanson de Roland as a source on the history of Charlemagne, except that the Shāhnāma was even further from the events it described. Moreover Gobineau's account of the Medes was merely a personal fantasy.Footnote ⁴⁰ And that was the review of a friend.

The rejection of his ideas about racial migration, as well as of his proposed decipherment of cuneiform and his myth-based history, meant that he published no more non-fiction on the Orient. Instead, he turned to fiction, and to stories in which his leading ideas about Asia were recycled in a disguised form. Nouvelles Asiatiques (Paris, 1876) can be read as an extension of his non-fiction on Iran, and observations from the Essai and from Trois ans were recycled in these stories. Nouvelles Asiatiques presented individual portraits of modern descendants of ancient races. Gobineau here again owed something to James Morier's Hajji Baba of Ispahan in which the Persians were presented as light-minded, venal and so forth.Footnote ⁴¹ The portrait of Persia and its inhabitants was certainly not totally unsympathetic to the Persians, but they were presented as morally degraded, as indeed all races were in Gobineau's darkening vision and there was also, for that matter, quite a lot of sarcastic criticism of Europeans in the stories. But he did truly love Persia and in old age he dreamed of returning to die there.

According to Martin Bernal, Gobineau was “an eccentric but reputable scholar”.Footnote ⁴² According to Edward Said, “The official genealogy of Orientalism would certainly include Gobineau, Renan, Humboldt. . .”Footnote ⁴³ But why then did Said not actually discuss the works of Gobineau and Humboldt? (Incidentally, the appearance of the geographer, mineralogist and botanist Alexander Humboldt in “the official genealogy of Orientalism” is even more mystifying than that of Gobineau, since Humboldt wrote nothing about the Middle East, Arabs or Islam and is chiefly famous for his travels in Latin America.)

Said also noted that Renan and Gobineau shared a common Orientalist and philological perspective and that Renan took ideas from Gobineau for his Histoire générale, but he does not say what these were.Footnote ⁴⁴ The conviction grows that Said had never actually read Gobineau, or Humboldt. And that his acquaintance with Renan was of the slightest. Their names come up many times in Said's book, but not what they actually wrote. Gobineau was an anti-imperialist, who believed that the British would and should lose India and that the French should take great pains to avoid acquiring an empire. He was certainly a racist (though one who admired Jews and despaired about Aryans) and he was just possibly an Orientalist, but the eccentricity of his ideas means that it is difficult, or rather impossible to fit him (or for that matter his critical admirer, the anti-imperialist Edward Granville Browne) into some banal thesis about the collusion of nineteenth-century Orientalism with imperialism.