Dr. Thomas Benfey

I work on late antique and early medieval Iran, with two areas of special focus: intellectual life in the Sasanian empire (ca. 224-651 CE), Sasanian engagement with Greco-Roman and Indian scholarly traditions, and the Islamic reception of Sasanian science, medicine, and philosophy; and the social, economic, and administrative history of Sasanian and early Islamic Iran, approached through the Middle Persian documentary evidence. I maintain interests in several other, related areas as well, including the Sasanian and Islamic historiographic traditions, the religions of Sasanian and early Islamic Iran (particularly Zoroastrianism and Islam), and Iranian philology.

• Reassembling Knowledge: Medicine, Astral Science, and Philosophy in Sasanian and Early Islamic Iraq and Iran (monograph, in progress)
• Land Management and Landownership in the Medieval Islamic World (622–1250 CE), from Ferghana to the Fayyum, with Hugh Kennedy and Arezou Azad (edited volume)
• Conceptualizing Religion in the Late Antique Near East ("minigraph", under contract with Cambridge University Press, Elements in Religion and Late Antiquity series)

• “Middle Persian Documents and the Making of the Islamic Fiscal System: Problems and Prospects”, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 87 (2024): 395–420.
• “Windādag’s Orders: Ten Unpublished Middle Persian Ostraca from Chāl Ṭarkhān-ʿEshqābād”, Deciphering the Illegible: Festschrift in Honour of Dieter Weber, edited by Maria Macuch and Arash Zeini. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2024: 15–30.
• “The Conceptualization of Religion and Incipient Secularity in Late Sasanian Iran: Burzōy and Paul the Persian’s Parallel Departures from Tradition”, History of Religions 62.4 (2023): 340–72.
• “A Greek Source for the Treatise on the Composition of Man Attributed to Aḥūdemmeh Anṭīpaṭrōs?”, Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 22.1 (2019): 3–37.

forthcoming:

• “A New Source for Samanid History: Two Bifolios from Central Afghanistan at the National Library of Israel”, Der Islam (accepted)

• Review of Chiara Barbati and Vittorio Berti (eds.), Iranianate and Syriac Christianity in Late Antiquity and the Early Islamic Period (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2021), in Journal of Late Antiquity 17.2 (2024): 560–63.
• Review of Karin Mosig-Walburg, Das frühe Sasanidenreich und Rom. Eine Forschungskritik, in sehepunkte 24.6 (2024), http://www.sehepunkte.de/2024/06/38466.html.
• Review of Eberhard Sauer (ed.), Sasanian Persia: Between Rome and the Steppes of Eurasia (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2018), Journal of Late Antiquity 13.1 (2020): 182–4.

• Simple Believers: The Layering of Knowledge in religious communities from Late Antiquity to Modern Times, Tübingen, July 16, 2025 (with Federico Montinaro and Thomas Jürgasch)
• Land and Power in the Sasanian Empire, Tübingen, October 25, 2024 (with Richard Payne)
• A Hard Row to Hoe: Landowning and Land Management in the Medieval Islamic World (622–1250 CE) (with Arezou Azad and Hugh Kennedy)
   

• Sommersemester 2025: Zoroastrisches Mittelpersisch (Pahlavi)
• Wintersemester 2024/25: Proseminar: Das frühe Sasanidenreich, 224–379 n.Chr.
• Wintersemester 2024/25: Manichaeism: The First World Religion?
• Sommersemester 2024: Conceptualizing Religion in Late Antiquity: Rome, Iran, Islam
• Sommersemester 2024: Manichäisches Mittelpersich und Parthisch
• Wintersemester 2023/24: State and Religion in Sasanian Iran (224-651 CE)
• Wintersemester 2023/24: Priscian of Lydia's Solutiones ad Chosroem: Philosophy between Rome and Iran in Late Antiquity