When Martin Luther, making his translation of the New Testament (1522), rendered the “magi ab oriente” (“magi from the Orient”) in the Nativity story (Mt 2,1) as “Weise vom Morgenland” (“wise men from the morning-land”), he cannot have known that he was coining a term that would continue to be used in Germany for the next five hundred years. In geographical terms, “Morgenland” thus originally denoted the regions to the east of the biblical Holy Land, but it soon came to refer, like “Orient” in other European languages, to whatever lay in the direction of the “rising sun” (Latin: oriens) f…