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Originally Posted by Ibrahiim al Balooshi
Salaams estcrh ~ Well I have to say that the Met does loom rather large in the business of trusted expertise and status... and looking at the contributor he also carries a certain degree of weight.
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Originally Posted by Jim McDougall
I agree with your comment on the veracity of Metropolitan Museum descriptions, which are typically remarkable in accuracy considering the notable figures who consult there and in their publications. I think often many assume that their publications fall into the general literature category of many auctions, museums and other catalogs in degree of errors. However knowing those who are typically involved in work by the Met, it is hard to imagine such errors slipping through.
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Ibrahiim and Jim, while you should be able to completely trust the descriptions provided by the Met that simply is not currently possible, you have to look at each individual item and decide for yourself if the discription is a accurate and or complete. I have spent a considerable amount of time going through every available image of the armor and weapons that can in any way be called "Indo-Persian" and the Met just has not done what can be called a great job of describing many of the items. I have found discriptions that are vague, incomplete and in some cased just plain wrong and for such an esteemed museum with such a wonderful collection this should not be.
Here is just one representitive example, this Persian char-aina cuirass was originally described for quite some time by the Met as being a 1700s North Indian cuirass, anyone with a bit of knowledge could see that it is actually a Persian char-aina cuirass, when I posted this on Pinterest a few months ago I questioned the mets description, expanded the description and added alternate names, you can see my recently made Pinterest post in the middle, now the Met has changed the description but they have spelled it wrong, you can see this is the following images.
It went from being a 17th century North Indian cuirass to being a 19th century Persian "chair-aina"...which is still not correct, the proper spelling is "char-aina".