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Document number: 8631
Date: 30 Dec 1862
Recipient: TALBOT William Henry Fox
Author: NORRIS Edwin
Collection: British Library, London, Manuscripts - Fox Talbot Collection
Collection number: envelope 22219
Last updated: 4th June 2013

6 Michael’s Grove
30h Decr 1862

Dear Sir

I took a paper impression of the Achæmenian head at Truro in the beginning of September or close of August last. It was exhibited there at the meeting of the Cambrian Association of which I am a member. My idea is that the head was brought home by some sailor as a token of his visit to distant lands, sometime in the last century, when all our Eastern fleets put into Plymouth: and Cothele being a noted place for excursions and picnics from Plymouth, it was carried there as a show, and then neglected, till it was lost in the pig-yard, when it was dug up in 1840. I have no objection to the Phœnician theory, and I said as much at the Association to the delight of the Cornishmen. I was not present at the meeting of our Society, nor do I know what they said about it, as I have been confined at home for a month with the doulormeux.

In my autumn tour I was invited to the Scilly islands by the “Lord of the Isles” and I went there with one of my daughters, the only one who had courage to face the unusually stormy passage, leaving the rest of my family at Penzance. We were most hospitably received at the Abbey, and passed some delightful days there. We had an Archæological day at Samson, the largest of the uninhabited isles, opened a barrow, and found a perfect kistvaen, with human bones in it but nothing else. A meagre notice of our discovery was printed in the “Western News.” The passage to the Islands is now so easy and regular, and the scenery so new and often beautiful, that I wonder the isles are not better known. There is work for an archeologist there, as well as in Cornwall, which is not half explored at Trelowarren, the seat of the Prichard Vyvyans, previously unknown.

Rawlinson <1> is come home from his wedding tour, and working hard. He has lately got a barrel of Assurbanipal, with a notice of Cuneiform sign his younger brother, (Sammuger? in the Armenian Esebuir Sammugina) and a tablet of his grand-daughter. But as the Government has discontinued its help, we have barely money enough left to print what we have already copied, and so soon as that is done Rawlinson will proceed with his translations; he has already done a good deal. – I have not yet seen Hammurabi’s inscription, and did not know that any notice of it had been published; when I get out I shall look about me. Do you know who is the Geo Augustus Starling. MD. who has been lecturing on “Cuneatic Writing” at the College of Physicians?

I am getting on with my dictionary, <2> which I can work at by the fire side; I think I have 10,000 entries, and at least 2 or 3 references to most words; a dozen to several: but I never look at an inscription without seeing many new words. I shall never finish it in my life time, but my work may very much lighten the labour of somebody coming after me. I may however publish a few roots as a specemin.

Yours very truly
Edwin Norris

W H Talbot Esq
&c &c

[envelope:]
H. F. Talbot Esq
11 Great Stuart Street
Edinburgh.


Notes:

1. Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, 1st Baronet (1810–1895), orientalist.

2. Norris, Assyrian Dictionary (London: Williams and Norgate, 1872).

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