ishtartv.com-
upenn.edu
May
4, 2015
A
love of murder mysteries that he picked up from his mother helped Grant Frame
become adept at reading and comprehending the ancient language of Akkadian to
translate the royal inscriptions of reigning Neo-Assyrian kings.
From
a narrow office on the second floor of the University
of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and
Anthropology, Frame
directs a National Endowment for the Humanities-funded
project that’s increasing our understanding of Assyrian and Babylonian history,
using never-before-translated or published royal inscriptions.
Frame,
an associate professor of Near Eastern
languages and civilizations, is an expert on ancient Mesopotamian languages
in the first millennium B.C. and Akkadian language and literature.
In
2008 he was awarded the first of four National Endowment for Humanities grants
to continue his research in the Royal
Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period, or RINAP, Project. Frame’s latest
$250,000 NEH award for 2015-17 brings his total NEH funding for the project to
nearly $950,000.
Frame
leads a team that is translating all known royal inscriptions of the
Neo-Assyrian kings from the reign of Tiglath-pileser III (744-727 B.C.) to the
reign of Esarhaddon (680-669 B.C.) in print volumes and online, in a fully
searchable and indexed format.
RINAP
Online enables scholars, students and those interested in Assyrian culture,
history, language, religion and texts to search Akkadian and Sumerian words
appearing in the inscriptions and English words used in the translations.
Born
in Toronto, Frame developed a fascination with ancient history and learning
about the origins of civilization on trips to visit family in England. He fell
in love with castles and ruined abbeys and tales of knights in shining armor.
Over
time he became interested in older periods of the history of Greece, Rome and
eventually the ancient Near East. Frame enrolled in the University
of Toronto.
“It
had the only real department of Near Eastern studies in Canada and was one of
the few places in North America where I could study ancient Mesopotamia and its
languages as an undergraduate,” Frame says. “Penn is another one.”
He
took many courses on the ancient Near East as well as courses on ancient Greece
and Rome in the classics department, going on to earn both bachelor’s and
master’s degrees.
“The
cuneiform writing system of ancient Mesopotamia seemed mysterious, more so than
the pictures of Egyptian hieroglyphs and trying to read them a mystery to be
unraveled,” he says.
After
he defended his doctoral dissertation at the University
of Chicago in 1980, Frame was offered a job by a former teacher at the
University of Toronto, A. Kirk Grayson, a specialist in Mesopotamian history of
the first millennium B.C. The offer was to return to the university and work
with Grayson on his new "Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia" project.
The
project became Frame’s life’s work. He has spent more than two decades
producing 10 volumes of official inscriptions of rulers from Assyria,
Babylonia, Sumer and Akkad.
By
the time funding for the University of Toronto project ended and Grayson
retired, all the volumes intended to be written had been completed.
In
2006 he joined the faculty at Penn where he is also associate curator of the
Museum’s Babylonian Section. He teaches courses on ancient Iraq, early empires
of the Neo-Assyrian Period and Akkadian historical texts, legal texts, letters
and literary texts.
Penn
has a long and honored tradition in the study of the ancient Near
East. The Museum was created to house materials found at the University's
1889-1900 excavations in southern Iraq at the ancient city of Nippur. The
Museum's Babylonian Section has the second largest collection of cuneiform
tablets in North America and the most important collection of Sumerian literary
texts in the world.
Frame
says that he feels very privileged to be a curator in its Babylonian Section.
“When
I came to Penn, I decided to try and finish all the remaining inscriptions of
the kings of Assyria and began the Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian
Period project,” he says.
Ancient
Mesopotamian rulers had countless inscriptions written in the Standard
Babylonian dialect of Akkadian, ranging from short one-line inscriptions to
lengthy, detailed inscriptions of more than 2,500 words and 500 lines.
Thousands
of these texts have been discovered preserved on tablets, prisms, cylinders,
wall and threshold slabs and artifacts from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Turkey and other
parts of the Middle East, Frame says.
The
official inscriptions offer insights into the lives of Assyrians and Babylonians
who are frequently mentioned in the Hebrew Bible and who appear in the works of
some classical historians.
Four
books have been published so far in the project.
Frame
is working on a fifth volume on the official inscriptions of Sargon II (721–705
B.C.); the latest grant is for a sixth, a volume of approximately 170 letters
from Babylonian officials to the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal; and he hopes to
eventually complete a seventh and final book for the collaborative project.
Project
data is searchable and fully integrated into online platforms, The Cuneiform
Digital Library Initiative and The Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus. The
RINA website is at: http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/rinap/.