Between 1925 and 1929 Frankfort was the director of the excavations of the
Egypt Exploration Society (EES) of London at
El-Amarna,
Abydos and Armant. In 1929 he was invited by
Henry Breasted to become field director of the
Oriental Institute (OI) of Chicago expedition to Iraq. In 1931 he became correspondent of the
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, later resigning in late 1944. He became foreign member in 1950. In 1937 Frankfort and
Emil Kraeling identified a woman on the
Burney Relief (c 1700BCE) as
Lilith of later Jewish mythology, though this identification is now generally rejected. In 1939 he published what
Gary Beckman considers to be perhaps his most influential scholarly achievement
Cylinder Seals: A Documentary Essay on the Art and Religion of the Ancient Near East. In a collaborative work with
Henriette Groenewegen-Frankfort,
John A. Wilson, and
Thorkild Jacobsen he published
The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man in 1946, an influential work on the nature of myth and reality. Frankfort published
Kingship and the Gods in 1948, "a classic work" in the opinion of
John Baines. In 1948 he became director of the
Warburg Institute in London. He was elected to the
American Philosophical Society in 1948. Along with EA Wallis Budge, he was revolutionary for his time for suggesting that Egyptian civilization, culturally, religiously, and ethnically arose from an African, instead of an Asian base. He wrote 15 books and monographs and about 73 articles for journals about
ancient Egypt, archaeology and cultural anthropology, especially on the religious systems of the Ancient Near East.
Erik Hornung in his influential work
Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt, The One and the Many acknowledged his debt to previous work done by Henri Frankfort. He died in
London. ==Personal life==