Jacobus Van Dijk (born 1953) is a Dutch Egyptologist, epigrapher, and philologist of the ancient Egyptian language, who was an Associate Professor of Egyptology at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands.
His research mainly focuses on the history and culture of the late 18th and early 19th Dynasties, but he also wrote on the temple of the goddess Mut and on human sacrifice in Ancient Egypt.
In 1986, Geoffrey Thorndike Martin the field director of a combined British and Dutch eight person archaeological team that included Jacobus Van Dijk rediscovered the tomb of Maya, Tutankhamun's treasurer, after a 10-year search at Saqqara.
was returned to the Egyptian government yesterday by the Metropolitan Museum of Art from New York due to the intervention of Jacobus Van Dijk: Between 2006 and 2009, Van Dijk and Geoffrey Martin joined forces again in a project to re-excavate the royal tomb of pharaoh Horemheb in the Valley of the Kings (KV57), which produced new evidence on the length of Horemheb’s reign, a hotly debated issue in Egyptian chronology.
[12] Van Dijk wrote in his article's conclusion "....that the scene in Room alpha in the royal tomb at Amarna showing a nurse carrying a newborn baby out of the chamber in which princess Meketaten has just died is a symbolic representation of her death and rebirth and that neither this scene nor its parallel in Room gamma have anything to do with the actual birth of a royal child, let alone that of Tutankhaten [i.e. Tutankhamun]”, as has often been suggested.