Why? Christies failed to adhere to a non-legally binding, non- enforceable 50 year old UNESCO resolution ignored by almost all museums in the Middle East and Asia & often, for manuscripts, ignored by ones in the West - for a book that shows no evidence of ever having been looted. https://twitter.com/rabiasquared/status/1276740152900157446

I much admire & appreciate the work of @stephenniem - but she's an archeologist, not a manuscript specialist. It's simply not accurate nor fair nor proportionate to apply the same criteria and standards as one would to an archeological object from antiquity to a medieval book.

"the context in which it was removed from its country of origin" is hugely relevant for archeological finds. It's often not particularly relevant at all for non-archeological items like medieval & later books, which move across regions, and from country to country, all the time.

Lastly, I do with respect feel it's a type of inadvertent Orientalism that these sort of objections seem ONLY ever to raised with Middle Eastern manuscripts, not with the countless comparable Western manuscripts - like French Books of Hours - sold on auction virtually every week.

There are many egregious examples of @ChristiesInc et al selling unprovenanced antiquities, and I've often highlighted and condemned this in the strongest terms - most recently with the MOTB Gilgamesh tablet. But medieval mss are different, and this is not a comparable situation.

It's worth noting that while antiquities continue to be looted in the Middle East for sale in the West, the flow of great Islamic manuscripts on auction for the last few decades has been almost entirely in the opposite direction - from collections in the West, to the Gulf States.

I hesitated to post this, because I hate to take issue with a tweet by an archeologist like @stephenniem who does such important work, and cares so deeply about the region she works in. But, respectfully, I felt her tweet was a category error: medieval mss are not antiquities.