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Originally Posted by Ibrahiim al Balooshi
Salaams estcrh ... I note that there are several ways of describing in spelling the armour above...which by the way is an excellent picture for which you are thanked for posting.
Personally I avoid locking horns with research departments of internationally reknowned museums as my knowledge is not that great and suggestions that the Met. is in some way not up to the job seems just a little harsh to me.
On the other hand it may be true to some extent in provincial museums of dubious reknown but that is rather down to finances I suspect.
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Ibrahiim, while there are several ways of spelling chai-aina as I have shown in my Pinterest image "chair-aina" is certainly a mistake, in fact they use "char-aina" on their other examples.
You are right that the Met is not a "provincial museum", it is an "internationally renown museum" and they should have high standards. I have absolutely no problem being a harsh critic of how they treat the arms and armor items in their collection.
The highly esteemed collector/researcher/author George Stone alone has over 1700 arms/armor item descriptions listed online yet only around 390 of his donated items have photographs attached. His items were donated in 1935 so in 80 years the Met has not been able to photograph these items.
There are around 7000 arms and armor related items with descriptions but only around 3000 have photographs attached, not a very good record in my opinion, it is not hard to take a photograph and add it to the image description.
Here are some more glaring mistakes (and one of many empty George Stone donation descriptions), three more char-aina, two are described as being "cuirass" so that anyone searching for "char-aina" will not find them. One is correctly described as being from "Iran" but no mention of "Persia", two are described as being "Indian" which I will say in my opinion is wrong, they both have the characteristics of Persian char-aina and not Indian.