Thomas Benfey is a historian of the ancient and medieval Middle East, focusing especially on intellectual and economic history.
He graduated from Princeton University with a PhD in Near Eastern Studies in 2020. As a postdoctoral researcher on the Invisible East programme, Benfey is primarily concentrating on Middle Persian and Arabic documents from early Islamic Iran and Central Asia (ca. 7th-13th cent. CE), and what they tell us about early Islamic economy. His first book project, “The Scholars of Sasanian Iran and Their Islamic Heirs,” examines medicine, astral science, and philosophy in Sasanian Iran, and how the
Sasanian legacy informed developments in these fields in the early Islamic world. His publications include: “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.
