Jørgen Alexander Knudtzon

Who was Jørgen Alexander Knudtzon?

Jørgen Alexander Knudtzon was a Norwegian linguist and historian. He was a professor of Semitic Languages at the University of Oslo from 1907.

Knudtzon was born in Trondheim, the son of consul Hans Nicolay Knudtzon and his wife Catharina née Trampe. Upon finishing his secondary education in 1872, he enrolled at the Royal Frederick University in Christiania. After a short spell at the Cathedral School in Trondheim, he returned to Christiania to study Semitic languages, in particular Akkadian, Arabian and Hebrew, the latter of which he would teach beside his studies. His first scholarly contribution was Textkritische Bemerkungen zu Lay 17,18, which was published in 1882. In the latter half of the 1880s, he studied assyriology and theology in Germany on a university stipend. He returned to Norway after only two years, where he resumed his Hebrew teachings. In 1889, he took his dr. phil. degree with the thesis Det saakaldte Perfektum og Imperfektum i Hebraisk.

In recognizing the Hittite language as Indo-European on the basis of two letters found in Egypt, he played an important role in the deciphering of the Hittite language script. In two landmark volumes he published the Amarna letters, diplomatic correspondence of the reign of Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, better known as Akhenaten.