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 on the project in Toronto, which produced 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 volume, one with most of the official inscriptions of 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/.