Royal Asiatic Society,
5, New Burlington Street,
London,
13 Jany 1860.
My dear Sir,
We read your translation of Sennacheribs Annals <1> last Saturday, and I have no doubt the Council will determine that it shall appear in the Journal. Could you not then get ready your notes that you mention? The translation ought to be so accompanied. I think also a transliteration into Roman characters would be of much interest, and though I can not speak officially, I think the Council would print that also. You will see in the Athenĉum and Literary Gazette such abridged notices of the readings as the respective editors think proper to admit; they are rather chary of taking too much.
I am happy to say I have completed the syllabarium,<2> after an immense amount of labour: hardly a letter has been set down, without a ten-times-repeated microscopic examination. It is now in the hands of the lithographers. There are four sheets, which, if full, would contain 500 items. We may set down our real amount at 400, for we must make a large deduction, of repetitions and deficiencies.
I am my dear Sir your faithfully
Edwin Norris
H F Talbot Esq
[envelope, blindstamped 'RAS' on rear flap:]
W. H. Fox Talbot, Esq.
Lacock Abbey
Chippenham
Notes:
1. Any publication of this has yet to be traced. However, WHFT later published "A new translation of the inscription of Bellino, containing annals of two years of the reign of Sennacherib," read 21 March 1866, Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, s. 2 v. 8, 1866, pp. 369-433.
2. Probably Norris's The Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia, produced by the British Museum, department of Egyptian Antiquities and lithographed by Robert Ewan Bowler (1794-1874), engraver, lithographer & artist, London.