Reassembling Knowledge: Science, Medicine, and Philosophy in Sasanian and Early Islamic Iraq and Iran
What if the foundations of Islamic civilization were laid not only in the deserts of Arabia, but also in the academies, courts, hospitals, and observatories of late antique Iraq and Iran?
BOOK SUMMARY:
Coming September 2026, Reassembling Knowledge: Science, Medicine, and Philosophy in Sasanian and Early Islamic Iraq and Iran by Thomas Benfey uncovers one of the most important yet overlooked chapters in world intellectual history.
Long before the celebrated scientific achievements of the Abbasid era, scholars of the Sasanian Empire were already engaged in a remarkable project of knowledge synthesis, bringing together Indian, Greco-Roman, Persian, and Near Eastern traditions into a dynamic intellectual culture that would profoundly shape the Islamic world.
Drawing on sources in Arabic, Middle Persian, Syriac, Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, Benfey reconstructs the scholarly networks that connected the late Sasanian and early Islamic periods.
From the court of the celebrated King of Kings Khusro I to the rise of Abbasid Baghdad, the book traces the development of philosophy, medicine, and astral sciences across a period of extraordinary political and cultural transformation.
Rather than portraying the Islamic intellectual tradition as a sudden beginning, Benfey reveals a rich story of continuity, adaptation, and creative exchange stretching across empires, languages, and civilizations.
At its heart, this is a book about how knowledge survives upheaval. The collapse of the Sasanian Empire did not extinguish its intellectual traditions. Instead, many were reconfigured and absorbed into the emerging Islamic civilization, helping shape some of its most enduring scholarly achievements.
Richly researched and intellectually ambitious, Reassembling Knowledge challenges conventional narratives of civilizational rise and decline, revealing the formative centuries in which the scientific, medical, and philosophical traditions of the ancient world were gathered, transformed, and transmitted into the Islamic Golden Age.
PUBLISHER SUMMARY & PURCHASE:
• Cambridge University Press:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/reassembling-knowledge/5BCBDC4D1660273089E687BEC91CD8A8