Dear Mar Shiprim Readers,
This month we thank Troels Arbøll, Associate Professor of Assyriology at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen, for taking the time to tell us about From Catastrophe to Culture: Understanding Epidemics in Ancient Mesopotamia (C2C): a three-year research project funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark through its Sapere Aude research leader programme.
With best wishes,
Pavla Rosenstein
Mar Shiprim Editor
In the Spotlight – Troels Arbøll at the University of Copenhagen
Can you please introduce yourself?
My name is Troels and I am an Associate Professor of Assyriology at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen. I have worked here since 2023, first as Assistant Professor, and since 2025 in my current position.
Troels Arbøll. Photograph by Lars Svankjær
I originally began my studies at the University of Copenhagen in 2006. I was initially enrolled as an Egyptologist for a brief time, but I soon discovered Assyriology and became fascinated with cuneiform writing and the cultures of ancient Mesopotamia, about which I knew little at the time, except from what I had encountered in the Old Testament. What I found particularly exciting about the field was a fascination with the cuneiform script and that cuneiform texts allow us to recover perspectives on human life in these fascinating cultures from so long ago.
During my studies, I gradually became interested in ancient medicine and how healing knowledge was used, practised, and transmitted. This became the focus of my PhD, which I completed in Copenhagen in 2017 and which was later published by Brill in 2021 as the monograph Medicine in Ancient Assur. After the PhD, I held teaching and research positions in Copenhagen.
In 2019–2020 I worked on the unpublished cuneiform manuscripts from Hama in Syria and as a postdoc at Nicole Brisch’s research project Hidden Treasures collaborating with the National Museum of Denmark. I later became a Carlsberg Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford from 2021–2022. Medicine and healing are still at the core of my research, but I am increasingly interested in larger questions about disease, epidemics, cuneiform cultures, and ancient sciences, as well as how to combine philology with archaeological approaches and the Natural Sciences.
Can you tell us about the history of Assyriology and related disciplines at the University of Copenhagen?
Assyriology in Copenhagen has a remarkable history with clear international impact. At its origins, the German explorer Carsten Niebuhr was employed by the Danish crown to participate in the Royal Danish Arabian Expedition of 1761–1767. During this journey, he made accurate copies of cuneiform inscriptions at Persepolis, which later became important in the process of deciphering cuneiform script.
At the University of Copenhagen itself, the discipline is usually traced back to Valdemar Schmidt, who taught Assyriology and Egyptology here from 1883. But Assyriology was established firmly as an independent field by Otto E. Ravn in the early twentieth century. The first formal programme was introduced in 1926, and in 1927 Thorkild Jacobsen became the first Assyriological graduate from Copenhagen. That makes 2026 a special year for us, as we mark the first hundred years of the discipline as an independent university degree in Copenhagen.
After Ravn, Jørgen Læssøe established a strong Copenhagen school, and several important Danish scholars came out of this research environment, including Mogens Trolle Larsen and Aage Westenholz. Since then, several other prominent researchers in our field received their training in Copenhagen. Following Westenholz’s and Larsen’s retirements, Nicole Brisch became Associate Professor of Assyriology in Copenhagen (2011–2023), during which time I was fortunate enough to become her PhD student in 2014. Since I later became responsible for the subject in Copenhagen in my current capacity, I have worked intensely on strengthening the discipline’s foundation here.
Assyriology has historically been closely connected to other fields at the University of Copenhagen, and today we form part of the Ancient Culture Studies section together with Egyptology, Archaeology of the Middle East, and Native American Languages and Cultures. We teach multiple courses together where students encounter both textual and material approaches to the ancient world. There is also a strong tradition of connecting university research with archaeological fieldwork and museums, such as the National Museum of Denmark and the Glyptotek. Danish excavations at Tell Shemshara in Iraq and Hama in Syria produced both rich archaeological material as well as cuneiform texts, and collections and archives from these expeditions are employed in research today.
The library at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Photograph courtesy of Troels Arbøll
Can you tell us more about the current faculty and students, including recent hires and graduate?
Assyriology in Copenhagen is doing relatively well right now, primarily due to external funding, on the basis of which we have been able to offer a non-tenure track Assistant Professorship (currently advertised, funded by the Edubba Foundation) and two postdoc positions related to my current research project on Mesopotamian epidemics (funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark). Though I am the only permanent Assyriological member of faculty, our teaching staff currently includes Dr Seraina Nett, Dr Jonathan Beltz, Dr Georg Cyrus, and Simone Sørensen, MA. We offer a full degree programme in Assyriology as the only university in the Nordics, including BA, MA, and PhD degrees. Though a national language requirement of basic proficiency in Danish or another Scandinavian language is currently a challenge for international enrolment in the full degree programme, exchange programmes fortunately offer an alternative, allowing international students to take Assyriology courses in Copenhagen without facing these requirements.
You’ve recently started working on From Catastrophe to Culture: Understanding Epidemics in Ancient Mesopotamia (C2C). Can you tell us more about the project?
The research project From Catastrophe to Culture: Understanding Epidemics in Ancient Mesopotamia (C2C) is a three-year research project funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark through its Sapere Aude research leader programme. The project runs from September 2025 to August 2028. The project aims to provide the first holistic study of epidemics in ancient Mesopotamia, drawing on cuneiform texts and archaeological evidence from the 3rd to the 1st millennium BCE. It investigates how epidemics emerged, spread, and impacted ancient societies over the course of approximately 2000 years of written history. Although individual texts and outbreaks have been discussed in previous publications, we still lack a coherent picture of how frequently epidemics occurred, how they spread, how people responded to them, and what happened to societies afterwards.
One major goal is to establish a timeline of epidemic events in Mesopotamia. The source material is deliberately broad and includes letters, administrative documents, chronicles and similar sources, magico-medical and ritual texts, omens, and literary as well as mythological narratives. We combine these with archaeological evidence for settlements, housing, population change and living conditions, as well as a survey of published results concerning ancient DNA and, where possible, incorporate epidemiological modelling in order to assess what we call urban infectious infrastructures. It is very much a collaborative project, and I ultimately aim for C2C to give epidemic history a much deeper and richer past.
The project team consists of Dr Jonathan Beltz and Dr Georg Cyrus as postdoctoral researchers, Emma Kattrup as student assistant, and myself as PI. The team combines Assyriology and Archaeology, and we also collaborate with the PandemiX Center of Excellence at Roskilde University and Statens Serum Institut (both Denmark), which is an interdisciplinary research centre, studying how pandemics emerge, spread, and affect societies by combining insights from epidemiology, history, social science, and data-driven modeling. C2C has an advisory board consisting of Associate Professor Heather Baker (University of Toronto), Professor Barbara Böck (CSIC, Madrid), and Professor Lone Simonsen (RUC, Roskilde).
The C2C project team, left to right: Georg Cyrus, Jonathan Beltz, Troels Arbøll and Emma Kattrup. Photograph by Seraina Nett
As part of C2C, you are looking at Sumerian and Akkadian literary texts to assess the “fear and trauma caused by widespread diseases.” How do you think literary narratives can be used effectively to explore the social impact of historical events?
Literary texts must of course be treated carefully, as they are rarely direct – and often not even indirect – records of historical events. At the same time, they may contain remains of cultural memories regarding past crises and the ways in which societies sought to understand and give meaning to them. A good example is the Poem of Erra and Ishum. The composition brings together war, famine, epidemic disease, and social breakdown in a catastrophic event caused by Erra. The poem presents the actions of Erra as a disruption of cosmic order. Erra causes destructive and destabilizing forces to take effect, but these are ultimately placed within a larger divine order and connected with astronomical omens. In that sense, the poem offers a way of conceptualizing why catastrophic events occur and how apparently chaotic experiences might be understood within an ordered cosmos.
The text also provides a means of trying to prevent such catastrophes from recurring by preserving the poem and transmitting it, either orally or in writing. For the C2C project, the Poem of Erra and Ishum is valuable as evidence for the cultural afterlife of mortality crises, and how repeated experiences of catastrophe could be remembered, explained, and even ritually manipulated.
Finally, back in 2023, you collaborated with your spouse, the ecologist Sophie Lund Rasmussen on the history of kissing, resulting in wide media coverage, including in the New York Times. In this article Rasmussen (in good humour!) is said to have remarked that: “As much as Assyriologists like to argue among themselves, they don’t really talk to other people.” Joking aside, what are your thoughts on interdisciplinary collaboration and what do you think we can do to foster broader dialogue in related academic fields?
First and foremost, I would like to emphasize that Dr Rasmussen’s remark was indeed humorously meant. Her broader point was that Assyriology has, for very good historical reasons, spent large parts of the field’s existence building its own foundations. Of course, Assyriology has never been completely isolated. The field has had close relationships with, among others, archaeology and Semitic linguistics, and it has drawn on a range of innovative methods or researchers from different fields, as illustrated by, for example, Gelb’s computer-aided analysis of Amorite or Kinnier Wilson and Reynolds’ publications on epilepsy. Still, if we disregard the last couple of decades, interest in other fields has not always resulted in publications co-authored by interdisciplinary groups of researchers.
Sophie Lund Rasmussen (left) and Troels Arbøll. Photograph courtesy of Sophie Lund Rasmussen
The situation has been changing in recent years, and our work on ancient kissing is but one example of how productive such collaborations can be. They open new conversations that help broaden the impact of Assyriology and make the subject accessible to a wider scientific audience and, in some cases, to the public as well.
Assyriologists work with one of the richest bodies of textual evidence concerning the deep history of humanity, and accordingly the field has something unique and valuable to contribute to interdisciplinary research. While philology and editing primary sources remain essential disciplinary foundations, the most productive collaborations emerge when researchers remain firmly grounded in their own expertise and simultaneously become curious enough about other fields to engage across disciplinary boundaries and allow new questions, approaches, and ideas to develop. I have personally let curiosity guide many of my research interests, and I think this is also the best starting point for collaborations. The important thing, to me, is that we do not simply borrow methods from other disciplines but enter collaborations in which Assyriology helps shape collective research agendas.
For more information about the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen, please visit:
For more information about the C2C project, please visit:
https://ccrs.ku.dk/research/ancientcultures/c2c
Interview by Pavla Rosenstein