A Toronto man’s work in translating an ancient empire’s long-forgotten words is taking on a new significance as Islamic State extremists defile Iraq’s historical sites.

Grant Frame, an Assyriology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, does not think of himself as someone actively defying the caliphate.

But he is.

“They’re trying to wipe out the ancient history of the Assyrians — of Iraq,” Frame told the Star from Philadelphia. “So, it’s incumbent on us to make the great achievements of the ancient people of Iraq known to everyone.”

Frame heads a team translating 2,600-year-old inscriptions from the neo-Assyrian Empire. The dominion was ruled from what is now northern Iraq, an area controlled largely by Islamic State militants seeking to purge, among many things, the remnants of the dead civilization.

The ancient cities of Ashur, Nimrud and Nineveh — from where most of Frame’s inscriptions come — all fell last year to extremists who deem the pre-Islam structures, many of which honour old gods, blasphemous. This year, the extremists released videos that showed them toppling statues and bombing buildings. The militants were also said to be looting artifacts.

“I find it so distressing, I try not to think about it,” Frame said.

The professor’s project began in 2007, before the ancient cities fell to the Islamic State group, though he says the militants’ rise makes his work all the more important.

Known as the Royal Inscriptions of the neo-Assyrian Period, the project seeks to translate the inscriptions of kings between 744 BC and 609 BC, a period when what is now Iraq flourished as the region’s most powerful state.

Funded by the United States National Endowment for the Humanities, the project seeks to publish the translations in print and a searchable format online; four volumes, representing words from four kings, are already out.

“So much goes back to ancient Mesopotamia,” Frame said, referring to what the encompassing region was then called. “The early developments of irrigation, some of the earliest — perhaps the earliest — epic stories, before Homer’s Iliad.”

Mesopotamia can be seen as where writing first developed, Frame added.

“People are tending to look upon these people as barbarians, and that’s the exact opposite,” he said.

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Frame’s project is a continuation of an earlier one — on slightly older inscriptions — that he worked on at the University of Toronto.

The project has not been adversely affected by the region’s turmoil, with Frame and his team translating mostly from inscriptions already taken out of the country or photographs of inscriptions.