Palmer, Edward Henry°
PALMER, EDWARD HENRY°
PALMER, EDWARD HENRY ° (1840–1882), English Orientalist. Born in Cambridge and educated at Cambridge University, he took part in the 1867 Sinai Survey Expedition of the Palestine Exploration Fund. In 1869/70 he traveled with Tyrwhitt Drake in the desert of Tih, Edom, Moab, and the Lebanon, and this resulted in a two-volume work, Desert of the Exodus (1871), in which he described the discovery of, inter alia, the site of Kurnub in the Negev. He was appointed professor of Arabic in 1871. In 1881 he left Cambridge and edited the Arabic and English Name Lists of the Survey of Western Palestine (1881) in which his excellent knowledge of Arabic and other Oriental languages served him well. In 1882 he was dispatched on a secret mission to Sinai in connection with British operations in Egypt against Arabi Pasha; he was assassinated there by Bedouin. His works include Jerusalem: the City of Herod and Saladin, written jointly with W. Besant (1888).
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[Michael Avi-Yonah]