Thorkild Jacobsen was an Assyriologist and archaeologist best known for his studies in ancient Mesopotamian social politics and religion. Jacobsen was educated in his native Copenhagen, studying Hebrew, Arabic, Akkadian, and Sumerian at the University of Copenhagen and obtaining his M.A. in Semitic philology in 1927. Afterwards, he traveled to Chicago to join the Oriental Institute, hoping to study historic texts with Assyriologist Daniel David Luckenbill; learning of Luckenbill’s death upon his arrival, Jacobsen instead studied Syriac and completed his doctoral dissertation on Bar Salibi, a Syriac commentary on the Book of Job, in 1929.

Jacobsen then gained his first field experience with the Oriental Institute’s Iraq Excavation. Throughout the 1930s, he worked in epigraphy at Khorsabad and in the Diyala region, excavated Sennacherib’s aqueduct at Jerwan, and even led an excavation himself at Ishchali. There, he helped to introduce systematic surface survey as a technique for reconstructing ancient Mesopotamian settlement patterns in order to learn more about agricultural history. He would go on to reestablish American excavations at Nippur in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania, implementing surface surveys that would enable later discoveries in waterways, salinization, and settlement patterns.

During this period, Jacobsen’s research included setting forth a refutation of the long-accepted conception of racially-motivated struggle spurring war between Sumerians and Semites. He also published numerous articles on Sumerian religion and myth, as well as Sumerian and Akkadian lexicography and grammar. Notably, Jacobsen also copied, transliterated, summarized and provided vocabulary for texts from the Third Dynasty of Ur. Back at the Oriental Institute, he applied this scholarship in joining the staff of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary. Jacobsen also made an impact by bringing several major cuneiformists to Chicago who had fled Nazi Europe during World War II, including A. Leo Oppenheim. However, by 1962, deep disagreements over the policies of the Assyrian Dictionary Project would drive him to leave Chicago and teach at Harvard University from 1962 until his retirement in 1974.

Throughout retirement, Jacobsen taught as a visiting professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Columbia University, UCLA, the University of Michigan, the University of London, and St. John’s College, Oxford. In 1989, the Hebrew University conferred upon him an honorary doctorate. At his death, Jacobsen was working on series of philological commentaries to his earlier translations of Sumerian poetry.