Jacob Dahl

Email: jacob.dahl@ames.ox.ac.uk

Website: https://www.ames.ox.ac.uk/people/jacob-l-dahl

Short Biography

I conduct research in three different areas of the history of the ancient Near East, early writing, early social history, and most recently the study of cylinder seals. All my research is guided by two principles: the use of digital tools and methods and the insistence on a comparative and interdisciplinary approach. I have published widely on the earliest script from Iran, conventionally called proto-Elamite (in use c 3300-2900 BC) and I am working on the earliest script from Iraq as well (proto-cuneiform). I have recently published c 125 proto-Elamite tablets and fragments in the Louvre and I am currently working on another group of c 100 proto-Elamite tablets in Tehran with colleagues in Iran and Oxford. I am an expert of the so-called Ur III period (the Third Dynasty of Ur) a brief period towards the end of the 3rd millennium BC when we have a particularly dense documentation of administrative texts (+100,000 texts covering c 50 years), and I have published on diverse topics such as succession to office, the calendar, and bureaucratic practices, as well as primary editions of c 250 texts.

I have recently spearheaded a project to digitise ancient cylinder seals and to enable a corpus approach to ancient art, and I co-direct the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, the world’s leading digital project for cuneiform texts online for almost 25 years and serving metadata and visual documentation for more than 350,000 cuneiform tablets.