Grant Frame

A native of Toronto,[5] Grant Frame attended the Royal York Collegiate Institute before earning a B.A. degree in Near Eastern Studies, with honors, from the University of Toronto.  He earned an M.A. degree in Assyriology from the University of Toronto as well.  He then pursued his PhD at the University of Chicago, where he earned a PhD in 1981 for a dissertation entitled, Babylonia 689–627 B.C.: A Political History, which he wrote under the supervision of J.A. Brinkman, Simo Parpola, and Erica Reiner.[1] For this study, Frame analyzed cuneiform tablets from several collections, including the British Museum, the Ashmolean Museum, the Vorderasiatische Museum in Berlin, and the Louvre.[1] He traced events from the destruction of Babylon by the Assyrian king Sennacherib in 689 to the death of the Babylonian ruler Kandalanu in 627, a period that witnessed the height of the Neo-Assyrian empire as well as the beginning of the collapse of the Assyrian Empire in Assyria and of the shift of power to Babylonia.  

From 1980 to 2006, Grant Frame was a member of the faculty in the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations (formerly the Department of Near Eastern Studies) at the University of Toronto.  During this time, he contributed to the Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia Project, by serving as its Assistant Director and at times as Acting Director.[6]

In 2006 he joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, initially as an Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and ultimately as full Professor.  During this time, he was also Associate Curator and later Curator of the Penn Museum’s Babylonian Section which contains approximately 30,000 cuneiform clay tablets.  From 2017 to 2020 he directed the Center for Ancient Studies at Penn.[6][7]

The Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten published Grant Frame’s dissertation as a book in 1992 and issued a second edition in 2007.[8]

As an outgrowth of his work on the University of Toronto’s Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia project, Grant Frame published Rulers of Babylonia: From the Second Dynasty of Isin to the End of Assyrian Domination (1157–612 BC), in 1995.  The University of Toronto Press reprinted this book in 2002 and issued a paperback in 2015.

Frame edited or contributed to many other volumes and published articles in dozens of journals ranging from the Journal of Cuneiform Studies and the Zeitschrift für Assyriologie to the Journal of the Canadian Society for Mesopotamian Studies.  He co-wrote exhibition catalogues, such as for a Penn Museum exhibit on magic in the ancient world,[9] and served on the team that produced the Penn Museum’s new Middle East Galleries, which opened in 2019.[10]   He has delivered public lectures on ancient Near Eastern history[11] and has advised media sources. He spoke in a panel in the BBC Radio World Service series on “Babylon, City of Wonders” which aired in June, 2020.[12]

In his book The Archive of Mušēzib-Marduk, Son of Kiribtu and Descendant of Sîn-nāṣir:  A Landowner and Property Developer at Uruk in the Seventh Century BC (2013), Frame published thirty-three cuneiform tablets describing the approximately 45-year career of an individual who bought properties in the city of Uruk in southern Iraq, including in the midst of a major rebellion. This private archive from Babylonia consists of land sale documents, loans with property given as security, and a legal proceeding. The tablets Frame studied come from the British Museum, as well as from the Louvre, the Babylonian collection of Yale University, the Free Library of Philadelphia, the National Museum of Iraq, and the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire in Geneva.[13]

As a faculty member for many years at the University of Toronto, Grant Frame contributed to the Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia Project, for as assistant director under the leadership of Professor A. Kirk Grayson.  Grayson retired in 2000 and ceded responsibility to Frame.  Shifting the focus to examine inscriptions to the Neo-Assyrian period, Frame established the Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period, or RINAP, and assembled a team to translate all known royal inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian kings from the era of Tiglath-pileser III (who ruled from 744-727 BCE through the era of Sin-shar-ishkun (ruled 627–612 BCE).  RINAP secured funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities in order to produce editions in printed volumes and in a fully searchable and indexed online format.[14][15] The translations cover thousands of texts that survive on clay tablets and cylinders, and in inscriptions on walls, objects, and other materials, from the region corresponding to what is now Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Turkey.[16]  So far several volumes of translations from the RINAP project have appeared in print from the publisher Eisenbrauns.