[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.
[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.
[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.
[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.
G. Frame, 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.
Ur in the Twenty-First Century CE: Proceedings of the 62nd Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Philadelphia, July 11–15, 2016.
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.
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.