Michaels Grove SW
23 Feb^y 1867

My dear Sir

I quite agree with you that there is room and need also for half a dozen workers in Assyrian Dictionary-making, and am very glad to hear that you have begun printing. I am fully aware that I have not registered anything like the whole perhaps not much above a half of what exists, though I have above 12,000 items in my dictionary with 7 or 8 references to many of them. Agreeing also with you in the necessity of proving meanings when I can do it, I usually give one phrase at least for every word introduced, sometimes half a dozen in cuneiform, in translation, and word for word translations, so far as I can, when I have any doubts about my own reading. I add the version given by others, principally yours^<1> and D^r Oppert’s, ^<2> as you have published more versions than others. So you see I have much work before me, although I have printed nearly 200 pages I am still in G, The latter part of my work will be fullest, because I add to my stock whenever I meet with a new word. I am fully aware that a large porportion of my work will have a plenty of false guesses in it, but future students may easily get rid of that. Of the word but I have only registered the two or three you mention. The meaning must be some sort of darkness or eclipse accompanied by calamity I think; You know, of course, that and are contracted as dark and light, night and day, black and white, setting and rising, &c see l. 14,15 & 17,18, in the 3^d column of 39.

I think we must read ihmuta in l 53 of this sheet, and compare it with hamuta of the like 54, as it with ihmuma, & hamuma of l. 55 & 56. Though I am in the dark as to the meaning of hamat the Hebrew טמח, the original value of which, according to Hürst, ^<3> was to travel about, & enclose. we have [unidentified language] to skin & [same unidentified language] to roast and [same unidentified language] a worm. but all this gives nothing to the purpose, that I know of.

We have in Tig. Pileser v.42. what can that mean? we have hamatu in Syl 69, unfortunately mutilated. I find in my book. “ahma (or ahsa) Botta vii/.128,8,” but as I have no copy of Botta ^<4> here, I cannot say any more about it

I must end this long scrawly letter; I think I am always in a hurry now a-days.

Yours sincerely
Edwin Norris

H F. Talbot, Esq
&c

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Notes:

1. WHFT, ‘Contributions towards a Glossary of the Assyrian language’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland; part I, n.s. v. 3, 1868; part II, n.s. v. 4, 1870; part III, n.s. v. 6, 1873.

2. Prof Julius Oppert (1825–1905), German Assyriologist, active in Paris.

3. John Fletcher Hürst (1834-1903), an American Methodist Bishop, who was Professor of Systematic Theology at the Martin Mission Institute in Bremen, Germany in the 186os.

4. Paul-Emile Botta (1805-1870), French archaeologist.