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.

• The Scholars of Sasanian Iran and Their Islamic Heirs (book project)
• 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)

• “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.

Im Erscheinen

• “Middle Persian Documents and the Making of the Islamic Fiscal System: Problems and Prospects,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies.
• “Windādag’s Orders: Six Unpublished Middle Persian Ostraca from Chāl Ṭarkhān-ʿEshqābād,” for a Festschrift.

• 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.

Im Erscheinen:

• 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), Journal of Late Antiquity.