The Abbasid-era chronicles have heavily shaped our understanding of Arab-Islamic historiography. Judging from these chronicles’ sources, Medinese and Iraqi scholars dominated the realm of history writing, as well as the production of knowledge more generally, in the eighth and ninth centuries. In contrast, Syria and the scholars who resided there are almost completely absent from the picture. This absence is compounded by the fact that there are a limited number of extant texts from Abbasid Syria. Historians have addressed this lacuna by turning to the Arab-Islamic biographical dictionaries. As Wadad al-Qadi noted, this rich corpus provides an alternative history of the Muslim community from the scholars’ perspective. In doing so, biographical dictionaries such as Ibn ʿAsākir’s (d. 571/1176) "Taʾrīkh Madīnat Dimashq" provide invaluable insight into generations of earlier Syrian scholars and their works. What we are left with, therefore, are questions of methodology. How can historians effectively utilize Arab-Islamic biographical dictionaries to shed light on scholarly activity in Abbasid Syria? And what other texts can orient our investigations into this immense collection of biographical literature? As a case study, my paper will utilize Abū Zurʿa al-Dimashqī’s (d. 281/894) "Kitāb al-Taʾrīkh" as a window into the scholarly milieu of Abbasid Syria. In his "Taʾrīkh," Abū Zurʿa collected and organized an array of information from earlier generations of Syrian scholars that is otherwise lost or scattered throughout later sources. As such, the text provides us with invaluable insight into Abū Zurʿa’s scholarly predecessors. My paper will analyze the text’s isnads and reports to create a list of Abū Zurʿa’s most frequent sources. By combining this information with the biographical literature available for these scholars, my paper aims to construct a basic prosopography of the scholars involved in the production and transmission of knowledge in Abbasid Syria.