Jacob Dahl is an Assyriologist with a specialization in Sumerian, pre-Classical socio-economic history, and early Near Eastern writing systems. He received his education from the University of Copenhagen and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Upon completing his dissertation at UCLA, he received a two-year post-doctoral position at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, where he spent half his time working at the Louvre Museum. He is currently a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), Berlin.
Dahl’s dissertation topic was a prosopographical analysis of an elite family from the Sumerian city of Umma during the Third Dynasty of Ur (ca. 2100 - 2000 BC). Addressing widely held theories of ancient Near Eastern patterns of succession, the dissertation tries to bridge the apparent gap between the seemingly incompatible systems of patrilineal and fratrilineal succession evident in the textual record by offering a new theory of succession during the Neo-Sumerian period.
Since 2001, Dahl has, in collaboratoin with Robert K. Englund (UCLA) and Peter Damerow (MPIWG), led research on the corpus of proto-Elamite tablets (ca. 3100 - 2900 BC). Proto-Elamite is the last undeciphered writing system from the ancient Near East with a substantial number of sources. Initially inspired and influenced by archaic cuneiform from Mesopotamia, proto-Elamite was a very short-lived writing system. However, more than 1,500 tablets have been found, the majority during the French excavations of Susa in the beginning of the 20th century, accounting for a total of more than 10,000 lines of text. Dahl is currently preparing a new sign list of the full corpus, and an edition of ca. 150 previously unpublished tablets and fragments in the Louvre Museum.
As a researcher at MPIWG, Dahl has of late directed the digital capture of a number of significant cuneiform collections for the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, instructing collaborators on the use of digitization and data management tools developed by the project. During the past two years, he has digitized tablets in Aleppo (Syria), New York, Chicago, Berlin, Oslo, and Birmingham (UK), making the form and content of thousands of cuneiform tablets available to colleagues around the world through the Internet.
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Dirk Englund
