When A. Kirk Grayson asked me in the late 1980s to undertake the preparation of the volume of royal inscriptions of Sargon II for the Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia (RIM) Project, I never thought that it would take as long as it has. The delay was largely caused by three matters: the need to deal with other editorial and administrative duties related to the RIM Project, the unexpected end of the RIM Project due to funding difficulties in the early 2000s, and, most importantly, the problems preparing satisfactory editions of some of the major texts of Sargon due to the loss of the original inscriptions and the unreliability of the available sources of information on those inscriptions. After I moved from the University of Toronto to the University of Pennsylvania in 2006, I was encouraged by Erle Leichty to revive the project, or at least the section dealing with Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions. With the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, in 2008 I founded the Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period (RINAP) Project and since that time have directed the preparation and publication of five volumes. Work on the Sargon volume continued during all of this time, although with numerous gaps as other duties and projects took priority. Two of the inscriptions presented in this volume — the Nineveh Prism and the Najafabad Stele (text nos. 82 and 117) — are the result of collaboration between the author and Andreas Fuchs (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen), and the author's appreciation for all his work must be stressed. Fuchs had already published an edition of the former text about twenty years ago (SAAS 8) and the edition of the latter text presented here is the result of extensive discussion and deliberation between the two of us.
Work on the present corpus of texts necessitated extensive travel for collation of previously published inscriptions and for examination of unpublished material. The author wishes to thank the various museums and museum authorities that have cooperated in the preparation of this book. In particular, he would like to thank the directors, keepers, curators, and assistants of the Louvre Museum (Paris), the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (Chicago), the British Museum (London), the Institut de France (Paris), the Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto), the Vorderasiatisches Museum (Berlin), and the National Museum in Tehran. Specifically, the author expresses his gratitude to Béatrice André-Salvini, John Brinkman, John Curtis, Andrew Dix, Walter Farber, Liane Jakob-Rost, Ed Keal, John Larsen, Joachim Marzahn, Kiersten Neumann, Susanne Paulus, Bill Pratt, Clemens Reichel, Jonathan Taylor, Ariane Thomas, Christopher Walker, and Michel Zink. These colleagues, and their staff, have been extremely helpful and have extended to me every courtesy and assistance.
As usual with a volume in this series, numerous individuals aided in the production of the volume in some way. Since the preparation of this book has spanned more than three decades, it is impossible to name everyone who has contributed to RINAP 2 and thus any omissions are unintentional. While the author has collated most of the texts himself, other scholars have kindly collated some texts, provided information on pieces, or aided in some way. These include Amitai Baruchi-Unna, Stephen Batiuk, Giovanni Bergamini, Eleazar Birnbaum, S. Borowski, Jean-Marie Durand, Jeanette Fincke, Kirk Grayson, Joshua Jeffers, Enrique Jiménez, Jacob Lauinger, Erle Leichty, Gianni Marchesi, Nicolò Marchetti, Michael Müller-Karpe, Jamie Novotny, Karen Radner, Julian Reade, Johannes Renger, Michael Roaf, Marcel Sigrist, Greta Van Buylaere, Chikako Watanabe, Frauke Weiershäuser, Manfred Weippert, and Joan Goodnick Westenholz. During my various periods of working in museums and collections outside of Toronto and Philadelphia, I received much gracious hospitality from numerous friends and colleagues. During a sabbatical in 2013–2014 spent in Oxford working on the manuscript, the author received much kind fellowship and support from Tim and Kathy Clayden, Jacob Dahl, Stephanie Dalley, and Frances Reynolds and Philip Binns, as well as the fellows of Wolfson College. My thanks must also to Richard Beal and JoAnne Scurlock for hospitality during a stay in Chicago, and to Denise Bolton, Jamie Novotny, Karen Radner, Michael Roaf, Walther Sallaberger, and Frans van Koppen during stays in Munich.
In Toronto, during the RIM years, several individuals contributed to the technical and editorial preparation of the volume and they deserve credit for performing at times tedious and time-consuming tasks. In particular, the author offers his gratitude to Amy Barron, Hope Grau, Diane Kriger, and Jill Ruby. For the Philadelphia stages of production, the author would like to thank various colleagues and students: Katy Blanchard, Tegan Bunsu, Michael Chapin, Ann Guinan, Andrew Knapp, Daniel Patterson, Irene Sibbing Plantholt, Steve Tinney, Richard Zettler, and Ilona Zsolnay. Last, but by no means least, special thanks must be given to Joshua Jeffers and Steve Tinney in Philadelphia and to Giulia Lentini, Nathan Morello, and Jamie Novotny in Munich for help in numerous ways, in particular for undertaking the arduous task of preparing the final, camera-ready manuscript and the fully lemmatized and searchable online version for the texts.
The penultimate manuscript of RINAP 2 was read by Ariel Bagg, Nicholas Postgate, and Martin Worthington, each of whom made numerous useful comments, corrections, and improvements. Their time, care, and generosity are greatly appreciated. Any and all errors of commission and omission are, of course, the responsibility of the author.
Since the Editor-in-Chief of the RINAP series is also the author of this volume, Karen Radner, a member of the editorial board, kindly assumed the role of Editor-in-Chief for the volume.
The author's appreciation goes out to the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the University of Toronto, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, as well as to several private individuals, in particular Laurence Shiff and Malcolm Horsnell, for both financial and material support in support of the work of the RIM and/or RINAP Projects and thus the preparation of this volume.
Finally, the author wishes to express his gratitude to his numerous teachers of Akkadian and Sumerian over the years as a student at the University of Toronto and the University of Chicago: R.D. Biggs, J.A. Brinkman, M. Civil†, I.J. Gelb†, G.B. Gragg, A.K. Grayson, H. Hunger, S. Parpola, E. Reiner†, J. Renger, M. Rowton†, and R.F.G. Sweet. He hopes that nothing in this volume will make them regret their encouragement, support, and advice during his training.
Philadelphia, June 2020
Grant Frame
Grant Frame
Grant Frame, 'Preface', RINAP 2: Sargon II, Sargon II, The RINAP 2 sub-project of the RINAP Project, 2021 [http://oracc.org/rinap/rinap2/rinap2frontmatter/preface/]