Grant Frame
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University of Chicago
Grant Frame | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1950 (age 75–76) |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | University of Toronto University of Chicago |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | University of Pennsylvania |
Grant Frame (born 1950[1]) is a Canadian-American Assyriologist, Professor Emeritus of the University of Pennsylvania, and Curator Emeritus of the Babylonian Section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.[2] He is an expert on Akkadian language and literature and on the history and culture of ancient Mesopotamia in the first millennium BCE, in particular the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods. Since 2008, he has served as Director and Editor-in-Chief of The Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period (RINAP), an international research project funded by the U.S. government's National Endowment for the Humanities and other granting agencies, to translate the royal inscriptions of the rulers of Assyria from 744 to 609 BC. The RINAP project marks the continuation of the Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia (RIM) project, which Frame's teacher and mentor, Albert Kirk Grayson, founded at the University of Toronto in 1978[3] and led until his retirement with support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.[4]
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]
