#sumerology

-> https://history299.floraenfrances.com/ (sumerian death culture via mythic literature)

Hello! Sometimes an ask leads me on a deeper hunt than I ever expected.

I also couldn't find a reference for RIMI - but based on the pattern of other Royal Inscription of Mesopotamia projects (a series of publications from the University of Toronto), my best guess is that the I does stand for Iranian. Here's an Oracc article on the history and significance of royal inscriptions, with citations to several of the publications.

I ended up reaching out to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, where the ring you linked is housed. After a couple calls referring me to different departments, I learned that RIMI is almost certainly a translation project in the RIM series that C.B.F. Walker never finished or published. I'm not sure why it's listed as 1981, since the MFA's records have "no date (of publication)". 1981 is also before the MFA acquired the ring in 1985, and they have no known translation work done on it since then - so it's possible the only person who's every translated the text on the ring is Walker himself.

They did refer me to one other reference about this ring, though, also from 1981 - Muscarella's article on Surkh Dum excavations in the Journal of Field Archaeology (JStor link, the ring section is p. 344). I can't tell exactly what ring in that article is referring to this particular one, but one is mentioned as having the inscription dingir-mesh (Sumerian for "they are gods" or "... are the gods"), which Muscarella says is "part of a prayer invoking the gods." On the rings, Muscarella cites Porada 1964 ("Nomads and Luristan Bronzes", which I can't find a link for, but you can find a description of her work in this 1989 Encyclopaedia Iranica article).

Circling back to Walker, he was a curator of Western Asiatic antiquities at the British Museum, so I reached out to them next. I learned that they don't keep contact info for retired staff members, and I don't know of another way to contact him (or even where he is now). Unfortunately this is a frequent issue I've encountered in Mesopotamian research - somebody works on things, doesn't end up publishing, and then retires or changes field, taking everything with them.

Certainly! No, I haven’t studied Sumerian professionally — my educational background is mostly in ancient Greek — so it’s just a hobby, albeit an intense one. If you’d like to know a little more about me & how I got into Sumerian, check out my Q&A video from a few months ago; I talk about my background starting at about a minute in.

The only US colleges I know of that offer an undergraduate major in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations (NELC, which is the area that Sumerology is generally under) are at UChicago and at Harvard, although the latter primarily offers Sumerian only to graduate students. Among Classics programs, the CAMS department at Penn State has one which is relatively strongly concentrated in Mesopotamian studies. Sumerian is taught as an option at Oxford and the University of London, and possibly elsewhere in the UK & Europe. But other than those, your best bet may be to go into Classics, Linguistics or a related field and work towards NELC/Sumerology in graduate school!