This paper will inquire into the process of creating the Arabic poetic canon. The three foundational collections ¬– the Muʿallaqāt, the Mufaḍḍaliyāt, and Abu Tammām’s Ḥamāsa – were all written down between the 7th and the 9th centuries AD. Al-Mufaḍḍal al-Ḍabbī in the 8th century wrote his anthology for the crown prince and future caliph al-Mahdī. The origins of the Muʿallaqāt may be connected even more directly with the caliphal power, as accounts in Ahmad b. Abi Tahir Tayfur’s Kitāb al-manthūr wa-l-manẓūm ascribe their collections to Muʿāwiya and ʿAbd al-Malik. Preserving old poetry seems to have been on the minds of the makers of the Islamic empire from early on. I suggest that we need to see the efforts to collect ancient poetry as part of broader consolidation and classification of knowledge, going on simultaneously in different fields at that time – law (Mālik’s Muwaṭṭaʾ), Islamic jurisprudence (Shafiʿī’s Risāla), ḥadīth (Bukhari and Muslim), and next to the Translation Movement that rendered Greek philosophical and scientific knowledge into Arabic. Furthermore, I will consider parallel efforts to collect secular poetic heritage in different places of the region in roughly the same period. To the West of Baghdad, Byzantium after year 1000 witnessed the revival of Hellenism first in the form of philosophy (Michael Psellos) and then of Greek literary heritage (e.g., the 12th century Homerist Eustathios of Thessalonike). To the East, the Samanids in the 10th century patronized the compositions of epic poems retelling ancient Iranian legends and heroic traditions, of which Ferdowsi’s Shāhnāme had the most lasting impact. In the heart of the Islamic realm, the 9th-century Antony of Tagrit wrote his Syriac Rhetoric in which he frequently quotes from Greek and Syriac sources, both Christian, such as Ephrem, and non-Christian, such as Plutarch and the Iliad. Maria Mavroudi (2018) has recently noted that Byzantine and Arabic poetry offer parallels when it comes to “the process whereby an earlier literary heritage can be accommodated at the face of enormous ideological, social, and political change generated by the victory of a new religion.” This paper will examine this process through a close reading of the Arabic accounts about the emergence of the three collections put in a comparative perspective.