13 Montague Place,
22 September 1870
My dear Sir,
Many thanks for your correction of Beltis; but what shall I make of kisitha Bikitta? if kisal be an altar I cannot understand its enclosure. We have it also in Fig. <9?> <in?> 75 from the bottom of the water adi pasqi sikitta-sum, in Botta 1<4?>5.1 <u?>s-atiiru sikitta; in Sen Go.56 usandila sikittas. I want to conciliate all these. I have been very busy lately, and have not had time to make investigations but I remember idalani somewhere relating to drawing up boats on the banks of a river. I am going regularly through your glossary, and have found several useful notes; but occasionally I meet a reference to a numbered Tablet, such as 169 in your No 157 in p 9 Part 2. The word I want is <cuneiform>. I find a no 169 in Rawlinson Vol.II at the foot of Sheet 25, but do not see tarda in that page. I have met with nuturda with <cuneiform> and explained it somewhere as eunuch, understanding it as not-son-having, and I think I have it somewhere explained by “neither man nor woman” in one of the bilingual slabs published, but have mislaid the reference.
I feel as you do the annoyance of misprints, and think a publication of all we know or suspect would be of great value. I have found more than a hundred certain, and I suspect many more, I have registered many, but they are scattered about. I think I have met with <cuneiform> for <cuneiform> a dozen times.
I am getting on with the verbs systematically, but it is a very troublesome task; a single root has sometimes taken me three or four days and I have more than 500 roots recorded. I propose to print all the forms I find, with the passages in which they occur, pretty nearly as done by Hincks and printed in Burgess. They will make a volume of themselves.
Rawlinson has gone pretty carefully through my dictionary making notes. I have looked at a great many of them. very valuable. I wish he would publish them, but as that is not likely, I hope they will be preserved, and printed by somebody or other, at a future day. I must now close this long story
Yours faithfully,
Edwin Norris
H. Fox Talbot Esq
&c &c &c