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[Thorkild Jacobsen died on May 2, 1993, within a forthnight of delivering the Presidential Address at the meeting of the American Oriental Society in Chapel Hill, N.C. Professor Zvi Abusch of Brandeis University gave, at that time, an eloquent introduction of the speaker, which is reproduced below without any changes.]**
It is an honor to introduce Professor Thorkild Jacobsen. Thorkild Jacobsen is Professor of Assyriology Emeritus, Harvard University. He is one of the most eminent scholars of the humanities. Professor Jacobsen's work in Assytiology and Near Eastern archaeology has spanned much of this century and today, at eighty-eight, he continues to be a vibrant and creative scholar.
Thorkild Jacobsen was born in Denmark in 1904. Already as a teenager, he was drawn to ancient studies. He studied Assyriology at the University of Copenhagen with Ravn and Pallis. In the late 1920s, he continued his graduate studies at the Oriental Institute and there completed his first doctorate. In the 1930s he excavated in Iraq with Henri Frankfort. He returned to Chicago before the war, and collaborated with the Frankforts and Wilson on The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man and Most Ancient Verse. In the late 40s, he was Director of the Oriental Institute and Dean of Humanities. In 1962 he joined the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, from which institution he retired in 1974. Since his retirement, he has taught at several universities. He has served as a visiting professor no less than three times at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, which university awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1989.
I assume that I was asked to introduce Professor Jacobsen because I am one of his students. To witness Jacobsen uncovering the meaning of a text by a meticulous and analytic reading tempered by sensitive inquiry is to experience the philological enterprise at its profoundest. Studying with Jacobsen was one of the most exciting and moving experiences of my life. But the breadth, depth, and diversity of Jacobsen's contributions to the understanding of Mesopotamian civilization have made all of us his students.
Thorkild Jacobsen's work is pioneering and enduring, brilliant and original. He has recreated an image of a past civilization. Always a historian, he has recovered such lost institutions as primitive...