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Thorkild Jacobsen (June 7 1904 – May 2 1993)

Jacobsen was born in Copenhagen, and studied Assyriology at the University there with O. E. Ravn, earning the M.A. In 1927 he accepted a fellowship at the University of Chicago, where he received the Ph.D. in 1929 (in Syriac, a temporary detour). He was a faculty member at Chicago until 1962, serving as director of the Oriental Institute (1946–48) and as Dean of the Division of the Humanities (1948–51). In 1962 he moved to Harvard University, remaining there until 1974, when he retired to the town of Bradford, New Hampshire, where he died in 1993.

Although Jacobsen participated in, and wrote about, archaeological excavations in Iraq, his primary interests were philological. An influential early monograph was The Sumerian King List (1939). He was especially fascinated by Sumerian grammar and by the literature and religion of the Sumerians. An important study of Sumerian religion was The Treasures of Darkness (1976). And selections of Sumerian literature were presented by Jacobsen in his 1987 volume of translations, The Harps That Once ... At the time of his death, Jacobsen was working on a companion volume of philological notes to those translations, and had sent to a prospective publisher a print-out of his transliterations of, and notes to, the first nineteen texts in The Harps (those in Part One and Part Two). A scan of that print-out is made available here.

Downloadable File

Jacobsen — Sumerian Notes to The Harps that Once... (21 MB) [/contrib/jacobsen/downloads/]

John Huehnergard

John Huehnergard, 'Thorkild's Jacobsen's Sumerological Notes to The Harps That Once', Thorkild's Jacobsen's Sumerological Notes to The Harps That Once, The contrib/jacobsen Project, 2024 [http://oracc.org/]