Eckart Frahm - Yale University
About
Press
Papers
We're Hiring!
Eckart Frahm
Yale University
Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
Faculty Member
Followers
148,636
Following
674
Co-authors
10
Public Views
Eckart Frahm's main research interests are Assyrian and Babylonian history and Mesopotamian scholarly texts of the first millennium BCE.
less
Related Authors
Jacob Jan de Ridder
Universität Leipzig
Nele Ziegler
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique / French National Centre for Scientific Research
Shigeo Yamada
University of Tsukuba
Jamie Novotny
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Joshua Jeffers
University of Pennsylvania
Grant Frame
University of Pennsylvania
Daisuke Shibata
University of Tsukuba
Karen Radner
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Matthew W Stolper
University of Chicago
Pierre Villard
Blaise Pascal University
Interests
View All (14)
Uploads
all
Books
117
Papers
Lectures and Interviews (Videos)
Books by Eckart Frahm
Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire
Basic Books
, 2023
At its height in 660 BCE, the kingdom of Assyria stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the Pers...
more
At its height in 660 BCE, the kingdom of Assyria stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf. It was the first empire the world had ever seen. In Assyria, Eckart Frahm tells the epic story of this empire and its enduring influence in global history. Assyria originated as a minor city-state in present-day Iraq. Much of its growth was fueled by greed and an insatiable hunger for war, epitomized in the words of one of its kings, “Before me, cities; behind me, ruins.” Yet violence was not all that defined Assyria. New research has shed light on other aspects of this ancient civilization: Assyria’s vast libraries and monumental sculptures, its elaborate trade and information networks, the crucial role played by Assyrian royal women, and the impact of plagues and climate change on the empire’s fortunes. Although crushed by rising powers in the late seventh century BCE, the Assyrian Empire launched a long tradition of multiethnic conqueror-states, and its legacy endured from the Babylonian and Persian Empires to Rome and beyond.
Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks. Highlights of the Yale Babylonian Collection
by
Agnete Wisti Lassen
Eckart Frahm
, and
Klaus Wagensonner
A stunning guide to the highlights housed within the Yale Babylonian Collection, presenting new p...
more
A stunning guide to the highlights housed within the Yale Babylonian Collection, presenting new perspectives on the society and culture of the ancient Near East
The Yale Babylonian Collection houses virtually every genre, type, and period of ancient Mesopotamian writing, ranging from about 3000 B.C.E. to the early Christian Era. Among its treasures are tablets of the Epic of Gilgamesh and other narratives, the world’s oldest recipes, a large corpus of magic spells and mathematical texts, stunning miniature art carved on seals, and poetry by the first named author in world history, the princess Enheduanna.
This unique volume, the companion book to an exhibition at Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History, celebrates the Yale Babylonian Collection and its formal affiliation with the museum. Included are essays by world-renowned experts on the exhibition themes, photographs and illustrations, and a catalog of artifacts in the collection that present the ancient Near East in the light of present-day discussion of lived experiences, focusing on family life and love, education and scholarship, identity, crime and transgression, demons, and sickness.
Agnete W. Lassen is associate curator of the Yale Babylonian Collection at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. Eckart Frahm is professor of Assyriology at Yale University. Klaus Wagensonner is a post-doctoral researcher at Yale University.
The Cuneiform Uranology Texts
by
Paul-Alain Beaulieu
John Steele
, and
Eckart Frahm
Philadelphia: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 107/2 (2017)
, 2018
A Companion to Assyria, Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley 2017 (xiv + 634 pp.). Also available as E-book.
Geschichte des alten Mesopotamien (A History of Ancient Mesopotamia), Reclams Universal-Bibliothek Nr. 19108, Ditzingen: Reclam 2013 (296 pp.). Also available as E-book.
The civilization of ancient Mesopotamia spanned more than 3000 years – together with that of anci...
more
The civilization of ancient Mesopotamia spanned more than 3000 years – together with that of ancient Egypt, its record constitutes nothing less than the first half of history. Hundreds of thousands of cuneiform texts, found throughout modern Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey, offer detailed glimpses into the achievements of the ancient Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians. Even though certain aspects of their civilization seem rather alien to us, these people have shaped, in indirect ways, numerous features of our modern world. This book aims to make the long and complex history and culture of Mesopotamia accessible to the modern reader.
Babylonian and Assyrian Text Commentaries: Origins of Interpretation, Guides to the Mesopotamian Textual Record 5, Münster: Ugarit-Verlag 2011.
The systematic study of written texts began, not in Biblical Israel or the classical world, but i...
more
The systematic study of written texts began, not in Biblical Israel or the classical world, but in ancient Mesopotamia. Nearly one thousand clay tablets from Babylonia and Assyria, dating from the eighth to the second century BCE, comprise the earliest substantial corpus of text commentaries known from anywhere in the world. Texts commented on by Mesopotamian scholars include literary works, rituals and incantations, medical treatises, lexical lists, laws, and, most importantly, omen texts. Frahm's book provides the first comprehensive study of the challenging and so far little studied Babylonian and Assyrian text commentaries. Topics discussed include the place of commentaries in the Mesopotamian philological tradition, cuneiform commentary types, hermeneutic techniques used by the ancient scholars, the sources of their explanations, the socio-cultural milieu of Mesopotamian commentary studies, canonization and the formation of the commentary tradition, the reception history of the Babylonian Epic of Creation, and the legacy of Babylonian and Assyrian hermeneutics. A complete catalogue of the commentaries and full editions of two typical examples complete the study, which is accompanied by a bibliography and ample indexes.
1. Introduction
2. Philology and divination: ancestors and correlates of the commentary tradition
3. Temporal and geographical distribution of the commentaries 4. Typology of the commentaries
5. Hermeneutic techniques used in Babylonian and Assyrian commentaries
6. Sources of the explanations
7. Texts commented on and their commentaries: an overview
8. The socio-cultural milieu of Mesopotamian commentary studies
9. Canonization and the formation of the commentary tradition
10. Cultic commentaries and other “explanatory” texts
11. A case study of Mesopotamian hermeneutics: The reception history of Enūma eliš
12. The legacy of Babylonian and Assyrian hermeneutics
Appendix (I. Selected text editions ; II. Some statistics)
Abbreviations; Bibliography; Indices
[in cooperation with Michael Jursa] Neo-Babylonian Letters and Contracts from the Eanna Archive, Yale Oriental Series – Babylonian Texts, vol. 21, New Haven: Yale University Press 2011.
This new volume presents facsimile copies of over two hundred previously unpublished Babylonian l...
more
This new volume presents facsimile copies of over two hundred previously unpublished Babylonian letters and documents written in cuneiform script. The texts, dating from the sixth century B.C., mainly originate from the archives of the Eanna temple in Uruk in southern Mesopotamia, and they contribute important information relating to the political, social, and economic history of this period.
Keilschrifttexte aus Assur literarischen Inhalts III: Historische und historisch-literarische Texte (Historical and Historical-Literary Texts from Assur), Wissenschaftliche Veröffentlichungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 121, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 2009.
The volume presents editions and facsimile copies of 80 historical and historical-literary texts ...
more
The volume presents editions and facsimile copies of 80 historical and historical-literary texts from the Assyrian city of Ashur. Most of them were previously unpublished. The texts include a letter to the god Ashur, a chronicle from the reign of Ashurnasirpal I, new fragments of Sennacherib's loyalty oaths, and a Neo-Assyrian literary-historical text about the 18th century Assyrian king Ishme-Dagan. The author provides an introduction and indices.
Einleitung in die Sanherib-Inschriften (Introduction to the Inscriptions of Sennacherib), Archiv für Orientforschung, Beiheft 26, Vienna: Institut für Orientalistik 1997.
Papers by Eckart Frahm
Tomb Reuse in Mesopotamia According to a New Middle Assyrian Funerary Inscription
Nouvelles Assyriologiques Brèves et Utilitaires
, 2026
Edition of a new Middle Assyrian funerary inscription, with discussion of a statement included in...
more
Edition of a new Middle Assyrian funerary inscription, with discussion of a statement included in the text explicitly allowing the reuse of the tomb by descendants of the deceased.
The End of Cuneiform Writing in Uruk, Late Babylonian Astronomy, and the "Phoenix Cycle"
Nouvelles Assyriologiques Brèves et Utilitaires
, 2025
An analysis of the latest cuneiform texts on clay tablets from the Mesopotamian city of Uruk, wit...
more
An analysis of the latest cuneiform texts on clay tablets from the Mesopotamian city of Uruk, with a refutation of recent attempts to date TU 11 and TU 31 to the first, second, or third century CE. It is tentatively suggested that a cryptic allusion to a 654-year cycle in TU 11 is not concerned with the reappearance of the Phoenix bird, as has been posited, but may rather refer to the simultaneous occurrence of a comet, rain, floods, and an earthquake in some apocalyptic remote future.
Review of Michael Streck, Altorientalistik: Einführung (Baden-Baden 2023)
Klio 107
, 2025
The Disappearance of Cuneiform Writing in Assyria and Babylonia: A Comparative Approach
문자와 문자문화 1 (Scripts and Writing Culture, Volume 1), Incheon (Korea)
, 2025
Studies related to the disappearance of cuneiform writing usually focus on the last phase of Baby...
more
Studies related to the disappearance of cuneiform writing usually focus on the last phase of Babylonian civilization in the first century of the common era and the three centuries preceding it. During this period, the use of Babylonian cuneiform became gradually restricted to fewer and fewer domains of writing, before the script disappeared entirely. The essay at hand analyzes this historical development as well, but it also looks at the demise of Assyrian cuneiform writing some seven hundred years earlier, in an attempt to gain new insights into both incidents of script obsolescence through a comparative perspective.
앗슈르와 바빌리에서 쐐기문자가 소멸한 과정 : 비교 연구 (Korean version of: "The Disappearance of Cuneiform Writing in Assyria and Babylonia: A Comparative Approach”)
문자와 문자문화 1 (Scripts and Writing Culture, Volume 1), Incheon (Korea)
, 2025
쐐기문자의 소멸에 관한 연구들은 대개 기원후1세기와 그 이전 3세기 바빌리 문명의 최종 단계에 초점을 맞춘다. 이 기간 동안 바빌
리 쐐기문자의 사용은 계속 줄어들다 결국에는...
more
쐐기문자의 소멸에 관한 연구들은 대개 기원후1세기와 그 이전 3세기 바빌리 문명의 최종 단계에 초점을 맞춘다. 이 기간 동안 바빌
리 쐐기문자의 사용은 계속 줄어들다 결국에는 완전히 사라졌다. 이 글 역시 이러한 역사적 과정과 함께 약 700년 전 앗슈르 쐐기
문자의 소멸도 살펴보고 이를 통해 두 문자의 소멸현상을 비교적 관점에서 조망함으로써 새로운 통찰을 제시하고자 한다.
刘昌玉：《文明失而不朽：专访亚述学家埃卡特·弗拉姆》
信睿周报，总第159期, 第1-5页。
, 2025
Interview about ancient Assyria by Liu Changyu with Assyriologist Eckart Frahm in the Chinese jou...
more
Interview about ancient Assyria by Liu Changyu with Assyriologist Eckart Frahm in the Chinese journal "The Thinker" (Beijing).
The Power of Ambiguity: Assyro-Babylonian Commentaries and Cuneiform Writing
The Dawn of Writing Systems: Cuneiform and Egyptian Hieroglyphs Through the Behistun Inscription and the Rosetta Stone (ed. G. Kim and H. Kim)
, 2025
Babylonian cuneiform, the writing system that was in use in ancient Mesopotamia for more than thr...
more
Babylonian cuneiform, the writing system that was in use in ancient Mesopotamia for more than three millennia, poses some serious challenges. Most cuneiform signs can be understood in more than one way – and for some, ancient dictionaries and sign lists provide up to two hundred different readings. Unsurprisingly, this complexity made the task of the pioneering scholars who deciphered cuneiform writing in the mid-nineteenth century very difficult. Even today, one can still ask why the scribes and scholars of Mesopotamia never systematically simplified their writing system. In this paper, it is argued that the multivalence of the signs was actually seen as a strength by these scholars rather than a liability. Assyrian and Babylonian literati believed that both written and spoken words denoted their objects by nature rather than by convention, and that by drawing on the various meanings of cuneiform signs they could find out how everything in the world was connected. The commentary tradition that emerged in first millennium BCE Mesopotamia illustrates this ancient “grammatology” better than any other genre.
모호함의 힘: 아시리아-바빌로니아 주석과 쐐기문자 연구 (Korean version of “The Power of Ambiguity: Assyro-Babylonian Commentaries and Cuneiform Writing”)
문자의 여명: 베히스툰 명문과 로제타 석비로 본 쐐기문자와 이집트문자
, 2025
고대 메소포타미아에서 3천 년 이상 사용되었던 문자 체계인 바빌로니아 쐐기문
자는 몇 가지 도전적 과제를 안고 있다. 대부분의 쐐기문자는 다음가적(多音價的)
으로 이해될 수 ...
more
고대 메소포타미아에서 3천 년 이상 사용되었던 문자 체계인 바빌로니아 쐐기문
자는 몇 가지 도전적 과제를 안고 있다. 대부분의 쐐기문자는 다음가적(多音價的)
으로 이해될 수 있으며, 고대 사전과 기호 목록에서 최대 200개에 달하는 다른 독
법(讀法)을 제공하는 경우도 있다. 그 결과 19세기 중반에 쐐기문자를 해독한 선구
적인 학자들은 이러한 복잡성으로 인해 매우 어려운 작업을 수행해야 했다. 오늘날
에도 여전히 메소포타미아의 서기관과 학자들이 왜 그들의 문자 체계를 체계적으
로 단순화하지 않았는지 의문을 제기할 수 있다. 이 논문에서 필자는 기호의 다음가
성이 실제로 이들에게는 단점이라기보다 강점으로 여겨졌다고 주장하고자 한다.
아시리아와 바빌로니아의 서기관들은 문자와 구어 단어 모두 언어적 관습이 아니
라 본질을 직접적으로 반영한 대상을 나타내기 때문에 쐐기문자의 다양한 의미를
통해 세상의 모든 것이 어떻게 연결되어 있는지 알아낼 수 있다고 믿었다. 기원전
제1천년기 메소포타미아에서 등장한 주석 전통은 그 어떤 장르보다 고대 “문자학
(grammatology)”의 면모를 잘 보여준다.
The Protagonist of the Underworld Vision of an Assyrian Prince
kullat ṭupšarrūti: Festschrift für Stefan M. Maul (ed. C. Ambos et al.), Wiesbaden 2023, 207–20.
, 2023
The paper seeks to identify the mysterious prince Kummâ, protagonist of the literary composition ...
more
The paper seeks to identify the mysterious prince Kummâ, protagonist of the literary composition known as the "Underworld Vision of an Assyrian Prince," and provides some improved readings of specific lines of the text.
Enuma eliš Outside the Cuneiform Tradition
Enuma Elish: The Babylonian Epic of Creation. The Library of Babylonian Literature, Volume 1
, 2024
The Babylonian Epic of Creation, also known as Enuma Elish, circulated outside Babylonia for more...
more
The Babylonian Epic of Creation, also known as Enuma Elish, circulated outside Babylonia for more than a millennium. Various versions of the epic provided the mythological background for cultic rituals in cities stretching from seventh-century BCE Ashur through first-century CE Palmyra to fifth-century CE Edessa. In the third century BCE, the Babylonian priest Berossus wrote a summary of the text that focused on the wondrous and the heroic, to impress an outside audience: the new rulers of the Seleucid Dynasty. The author of the first creation account in the Bible, in contrast, speaking to an inner audience – those who believed in the god of Israel – used the epic as a template for a thoroughly revised version of how the world had come into being. And in yet another take on Enuma Elish, the fifth-century CE philosopher Damascius, apparently drawing on the work of his fourth-century BCE predecessor Eudemus, gave a detailed account of the beginning of the text in order to demonstrate the existence of early eastern analogues for his own conception of the ‘ontological hierarchy’. This essay traces the legacy left by the Babylonian Epic of Creation outside the cuneiform world.
format_quote
The text's appeal stemmed from its celebration of autocratic divinity, paralleling the rise of powerful monarchies in first-millennium Western Asia.
format_quote
Review of K. Droß-Krüpe, Semiramis, de qua innumerabilia narrantur (Wiesbaden 2021)
Bibliotheca Orientalis 80
, 2023
Review of a recent book on the Assyrian queen Semiramis, with a new suggestion regarding the etym...
more
Review of a recent book on the Assyrian queen Semiramis, with a new suggestion regarding the etymology of the queen's name.
or
or
reset password
Need an account?
Click here to sign up
About
Press
Papers
Topics
Academia.edu Journals
work
We're Hiring!
help
Find new research papers in:
Physics
Chemistry
Biology
Health Sciences
Ecology
Earth Sciences
Cognitive Science
Mathematics
Computer Science
Content Policy
Academia ©2026