LONDON — A chorus of praise greeted the “record for an Islamic work of art at auction” achieved when a painted page torn from a royal Iranian manuscript, the Shah-Name or Book of Kings, brought £7.43 million at the Sotheby’s auction of the Stuart Cary Welch collection on April 6.

Little was said about the destruction of the greatest manuscript from 16th-century Iran, intact until 1957 when the French collector Maurice de Rothschild who owned it died.

The extraordinary manuscript commissioned for the library of Shah Tahmasp (1524-76) was acquired by Arthur A. Houghton Jr., a bibliophile whose interest lay in rare English books. He was presumably advised by Mr. Welch, who had long been buying manuscript paintings from Iran and Moghul India. Soon after, Mr. Houghton began breaking up the manuscript. In November 1976, seven pages appeared at Christie’s. Many more would follow, sold through art galleries and at auction, notably at Christie’s London on Oct. 11, 1988.

This astounding example of calculated vandalism perpetrated by a cultivated man is perhaps the most extreme where Eastern art is concerned. But it was by no means unusual.

Ripping apart the thousands of precious painted manuscripts removed from Iran, India or Turkey and taken to Europe in the 19th and 20th century was routine among Western dealers. It allowed them to make a bigger profit, as Joseph Soustiel of Paris remarked to me one day in the 1960s, when I asked why he was cutting paintings from a 15th-century Persian manuscript of Nezami’s “Five Poems.”

Sotheby’s recent sale included several pages from a 16th-century manuscript of the Golestan (Rose Garden) written in the 13th century by Sa’adi. The columns of text in a beautiful Nasta’aliq calligraphy by a great master are surrounded by blue or salmon-pink margins painted in gold with motifs relating to royal symbolism.

One page brought £217,250, or about $355,000. A bunch of other pages from the same manuscript, some suffering from staining, made £133,250. The book had been broken up in the early 20th century by the German collector Peter Schulz, who owned it in its entirety before sending one page to the 1910 “Exhibition of Mohammadan Masterpieces” in Munich, as Fridrik Martin, his fellow collector, noted.

Manuscripts from Moghul India, where Persian was the language of literature and administration, suffered a similar fate. In the Sotheby’s sale, a page painted with a scene featuring a ship sailing in choppy waters had been cut from a manuscript. The upper line reproduces a couplet by the 14th-century poet Hafez (not identified in the catalog) and the lower line has a couplet by another poet that does not rhyme with the former, which Sotheby’s does not mention. This botched assemblage, carried out in the 20th century, would be unthinkable in a manuscript of Persian poetry. Pompously dubbed “a page from the Salim [the future emperor Jahangir] album,” the beautiful but mishandled painting brought an astonishing £193,250.

The late Mr. Welch, who studied neither Persian nor Arabic, used to say that it is not necessary to know the languages to look at the paintings. To look perhaps, but to see, and to understand their meaning, it is.

Had he mastered a reading knowledge of Persian, the American collector might have realized how intricate the connection is between the image and the written word.

It exists even at an elementary level. The proportions of book painting in the 15th and 16th century are calculated according to set numbers. These are based on a modular unit that is the diagonal of the small square serving as a dot in certain letters of the Arabic alphabet.

Paintings in asymmetrical geometrical frames are matched on the facing page by a corresponding arrangement of the columns of text. Taking away one side destroys the balance of the double page. Moreover, the characters featured in any given scene are placed in relationship to certain lines of text.

Detached from their volume and framed as “Persian miniatures,” book paintings are reduced to an arbitrary construct suiting the desire of collectors unaware of the nature of the art.

The artificial construct fits into the overall reinvention of the Eastern world by the West.

Lumping together under a single denomination the infinitely diverse artistic expressions of the “Islamic World” is as inept as talking about Christian art from 8th-century Carolingian manuscripts to 18th-century French porcelain.

The misapprehension of historical reality that goes together with this reinvention can take a comical turn.

In the Welch sale, an early 13th-century cauldron signed in Persian by Abu Bakr Ebn-e Ahmad-e Marvazi was labeled “probably” from Daghestan. The qualifier Marvazi, “from Marv,” a Khorasani city in present-day Turkmenistan, points to a Khorasan connection of sorts. When taken in conjunction with other signatures that include qualifiers also formed on Khorasan city names and with the typically Khorasani motifs, this makes it clear that the pot originated in this eastern Iranian province. That some cauldrons signed by Marvazi surfaced in Daghestan merely reminds us that objects travel. Others have been dug up in Iran. The cauldron brought an extravagant £70,850. Ironically a rarer cauldron, truly from Daghestan as its shape and figural motifs show, only cost £26,250.

The lack of familiarity with the culture behind the art leads to misattributions. In Christie’s April 7 sale, the portrait of a lady attributed to “Safavid Iran, circa mid-17th century” was unlikely to be Iranian. The costume is not. That led the cataloger to speculate: “She may be a Turk.” But the tunic with its wide open collar is not Turkish either.

The Christie’s portrait falls within a broad class of portraits painted in oil on canvas in which a few details belie any “Islamic” connection — most blatantly a roast piglet depicted in one picture. Costume details make Georgia in the Caucasus a likely candidate.

On April 8 in an auction at Christie’s South Kensington, various inaccuracies betrayed the hazy understanding of the history, geography and culture of the lands that were dealt with. Fars is deep in the south of Iran, not in Western Iran. Khorasan is not exactly in Central Asia, and so on.

A “cast bronze rosewater sprinkler, North India, 16th century” was not a sprinkler but a wine decanter, as glass models filled with red wine seen in paintings clearly show.

Dating art can be problematic in this context.

On April 5 at Bonhams, a huge portrait of the Moghul emperor Jahangir painted in oil on cotton, 210 centimeters or 83 inches high with its calligraphic border, came on the block. When seen at Sotheby’s on Oct. 18, 1995, it had fetched £573,500 after raising questions about its actual period. It still does.

No other portrait of this size is known in 17th-century Moghul India. Jahangir’s eyes give a piercing look, different from the unfocused stare of the characters portrayed by Moghul artists, Jahangir included. The stiffness of the emperor’s hand resting on the arm of the throne is surprising, and the aura framing the head with its spindly rays is decidedly odd. A lumpy gray table looks like nothing on earth.

Bonhams, eager to verify the period of the painting, submitted a sample from the central field to be carbon tested. The 1440-1640 time span bears out the date of the cotton support, not of the painting. True, the pigments show no trace of modern color components. But if the portrait was done in a Revivalist style in the early 19th century, the pigments used would not either — traditional techniques were unchanged. Unfazed, bidders ran up the portrait to £1.42 million.

The rising fascination with royal history may be the reason that explains this gamble. Another portrait of Jahangir, in the usual small Moghul format, was sold at Christie’s for £825,250, 10 times what the experts expected.

At Sotheby’s, excitement over historic characters sent a silver-inlaid brass candlestick made for an official in the service of Toquztamur al-Hamawi, viceroy of Egypt (1340-41) and Syria (1342-45) climbing to a phenomenal £4.52 million.

The day some brass vessel from the Arab Middle East, the Iranian world or Turkey bearing the name of a major royal character turns up, if any remains outside museums, the sky will be the limit.