The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded Grant Frame, University of Pennsylvania associate professor of Near Eastern languages and civilizations, a two-year $250,000 grant for his Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period Project. The award brings to nearly $950,000 the total NEH grants Frame has received for the RINAP Project since 2008.

The first round of NEH grant awards and offers this fiscal year total $22.8 million for 232 humanities projects including Frame’s large award and two summer research stipends to Penn scholars.

As director and editor-in-chief, Frame leads a research team that is editing and translating all of the known royal inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Kings, including Sargon II and Sennacherib, who are mentioned in biblical and classical sources, in print volumes and online, in a fully searchable and indexed format.

“This project is preserving ancient history and making it accessible in printed volumes and online for scholars, students and interested individuals throughout the world,” Frame said. “I am extremely grateful for the NEH support and for the support we’ve received from Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences, the Penn Museum and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.”

In addition to publishing the work in a series of seven volumes, the project data is being entered into an electronic format and fully integrated into online platforms, The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative and The Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus. The RINAP website is at http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/rinap/.

Frame, an expert on ancient Mesopotamian languages, history and culture in the first millennium B.C.E., is also associate curator of the Babylonian Section of the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

Two other Penn Arts & Sciences scholars each received $6,000 NEH summer stipends to support their research.

Michelle Pinto received a grant for her project on France and the construction of postwar Africa, 1946-1966. She is a teaching fellow in the Benjamin Franklin Scholars Integrated Studies Program in Penn Arts & Sciences and a visiting scholar in the Department of History.

Catriona MacLeod was awarded a grant for her project titled “Cutouts, Collages and Inkblot Poems in German Romanticism.” MacLeod
is a professor of German in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature.