Take the time to (re)read this article by RJ Cadranell, one of the best ever written on the sale of Egypt’s Ali Pasha Sharif collection of asil Arabian horses, drawing on two souces: Lady Anne Blunt (her Journals, her Sheykh Obeyd Studbook, and some of her private, unpublished notes) and Carl Raswan (his Index). By the way, I don’t think I’ve ever shared with you my personal assessment of Raswan’s standing versus Lady Anne Blunt’s, as sources of scholarly information on Arabians. I don’t think many of you will like this assessment, but here it is anyway: I have found Lady Anne Blunt to be generally correct unless the contrary is proved; and Raswan to be generally incorrect unless the contrary is proved. Raswan’s defenders usually use such statements as “he was not a native speaker of English”, “his thinking was so complex and elaborate that few could understand it” or even “he was constantly making corrections to what he wrote” to absolve him. All this may be true, but scholarly research on Arabians is not rocket science, yet in my opinion, Raswan’s monumental body of work (his Index) is cryptic, garbled, ambiguous, incoherent, confusing and often downright contradictory. It…