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 will carry on where its 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 Dr. Lawrence Shiff. In all, it produced ten volumes in its various sub-series. Dr. 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 when the last RIM volume (RIME 1 by Dr. 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 Dr. Grayson passed on responsibility for the materials and manuscripts to myself, and thus 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 up-to-date, scholarly editions. While the volumes in the new series will resemble the format of the RIM volumes in most matters, the RINAP volumes will include indices of proper names and a selection of photographs; moreover, editions of the texts will also be available online, in connection with the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (Oracc).
This book, the first volume to appear, is number 4 in the RINAP series since it will be preceded by a volume of the inscriptions of Sargon II (currently being prepared by myself, with the collaboration of Dr. Andreas Fuchs for two texts), a volume of the inscriptions of Tiglath-pileser III and Shalmaneser V (begun by Dr. Hayim Tadmor and being completed by his collaborator Dr. Shigeo Yamada), and a volume of the inscriptions of Sennacherib (begun by Dr. Grayson and being finished by RINAP staff, in particular Dr. Jamie Novotny and Dr. Matthew Rutz). Dr. Jamie Novotny and Dr. Greta Van Buylaere are currently carrying out work on the inscriptions of Ashurbanipal and his successors.
The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded the RINAP Project research grants in 2008 and in 2010 to help carry out its work and my thanks must be expressed to it. My appreciation must also be extended to the University of Pennsylvania, where the project is based in the Babylonian Section of its Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Philadelphia, September 2010
G. Frame, Editor-in-Chief
Grant Frame
Grant Frame, 'Foreword', RINAP 4: Esarhaddon, The RINAP 4 sub-project of the RINAP Project, 2021 [http://oracc.org/rinap/rinap4/rinap4frontmatter/]