The present series of publications, Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period (RINAP), is intended to present up-to-date editions of the royal inscriptions of a number of Neo-Assyrian rulers. It is modeled on the publications of the now-defunct Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia (RIM) series and carries on where the RIMA (Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia, Assyrian Periods) publications ended. The RIM Project was initiated by A. Kirk Grayson at the University of Toronto in 1979 and over the years received extensive support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the University of Toronto, and private individuals, in particular Laurence Shiff. In all, it produced ten volumes in its various sub-series. Grayson retired from the University of Toronto in 2000 and a few years later found it necessary to cease scholarly pursuits due to personal and family illnesses. At that time, he handed over responsibility for the work of the project to me, formerly the assistant director and at times acting director of the RIM Project. When I took up a position at the University of Pennsylvania in 2006 and the last RIM volume (RIME 1 by Douglas R. Frayne) appeared in early 2008, the RIM Project officially ceased to exist. Work on several further volumes of inscriptions of Assyrian and Babylonian rulers had already begun during the time of the RIM Project and Grayson passed on responsibility for the materials and manuscripts to me. In 2007, I initiated the current project in order to continue the task of making the official inscriptions of the several important Neo-Assyrian rulers available in modern, scholarly editions. While the volumes in the new series resemble the format of the RIM volumes in most matters, the RINAP volumes include indices of proper names, and editions of the texts are also available online, in connection with the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) and the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus Initiative (Oracc).
Five volumes have already appeared in this series: RINAP 1, comprising the inscriptions of Tiglath-pileser III and Shalmaneser V (begun by Hayim Tadmor and completed by Shigeo Yamada); RINAP 3/1–2, comprising the inscriptions of Sennacherib (begun by A. Kirk Grayson and completed by his collaborator Jamie Novotny); RINAP 4, comprising the inscriptions of Esarhaddon (by Erle Leichty, with a contribution by Grant Frame); and RINAP 5/1, comprising many of the inscriptions of Ashurbanipal (by Jamie Novotny and Joshua Jeffers). The remainder of the royal inscriptions of Ashurbanipal and those of his successors Aššur-etel-ilāni and Sîn-šarra-iškun will be presented in two forthcoming volumes (RINAP 5/2 and 5/3) by Joshua Jeffers and Jamie Novotny. The present volume (RINAP 2) provides editions of the inscriptions of Sargon II and has been completed by myself, with the collaboration of Andreas Fuchs for text nos. 82 (Nineveh Prism) and 117 (Najafabad Stele).
The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded the RINAP Project research grants in 2008, 2010, 2012, 2015, and 2017, as well as supplementary funds in 2019, to help carry out its work and my sincere thanks must be expressed to it. My appreciation must also be extended to the University of Pennsylvania and to the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, where the project is based, for their constant support. Additional funding for the preparation of RINAP 2 was provided by the University of Pennsylvania Research Foundation and the School of Arts and Sciences of the University of Pennsylvania, as well as by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (through the establishment of the Alexander von Humboldt Professorship for Ancient History of the Near and Middle East in 2015) and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (Historisches Seminar – Abteilung Alte Geschichte). I am grateful to Karen Radner for providing additional financial support for the project.
Philadelphia, June 2020
Grant Frame
Grant Frame
Grant Frame, 'Foreword', RINAP 2: Sargon II, Sargon II, The RINAP 2 sub-project of the RINAP Project, 2021 [http://oracc.org/rinap/rinap2/rinap2frontmatter/]