Edward Henry Palmer

The Desert of the Exodus, Part 1: Journeys on Foot in the Wilderness of the Forty Years' Wanderings (1871) Edward Henry Palmer

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Contributor Bio:  Palmer, Edward Henry Edward Henry Palmer (7 August 1840 - August 1882) was an English orientalist. Palmer was born in Green Street, Cambridge the son of a private schoolmaster. He was orphaned at an early age and brought up by an aunt. He was educated at The Perse School, and as a schoolboy showed the characteristic bent of his mind by picking up the Romany tongue and a great familiarity with the life of the Gypsies. From school he was sent to London as a clerk in the city. Palmer disliked this life, and varied it by learning French and Italian, mainly by frequenting the society of foreigners wherever he could find it. In 1859 he returned to Cambridge, almost dying of consumption. He made a miraculous recovery, and in 1860, while he was thinking of a new start in life, fell in with Sayyid Abdallah, teacher of Hindustani at Cambridge, under whose influence he began his Oriental studies. He matriculated at St John's College in November 1863, and in 1867 was elected a fellow on account of his attainments as an orientalist, especially in Persian and Hindustani. During his residence at St Johns he catalogued the Persian, Arabic and Turkish manuscripts in the university library, and in the libraries of Kings and Trinity. In 1867 he published a treatise on Oriental mysticism, based on the Maksad-i-Aksa of Aziz ibn Mohammad Nafasi. He was engaged in 1869 to join the survey of Sinai, undertaken by the Palestine Exploration Fund, and followed up this work in the next year by exploring the desert of El-Tih in company with Charles Drake. They completed this journey on foot and without escort, making friends among the Bedouin, to whom Palmer was known as Abdallah Effendi. After a visit to the Lebanon and to Damascus, where he made the acquaintance of Sir Richard Burton, then consul there, he returned to England in 1870 by way of Constantinople and Vienna. At Vienna he met Arminius Vambery. The results of this expedition appeared in the Desert of the Exodus (1871); in a report published in the journal of the Palestine Exploration Fund (1871); and in an article on the "Secret Sects of Syria" in the Quarterly Review (1873). In the close of the year 1871 he became Lord Almoner's Professor of Arabic at Cambridge University, married, and settled down to teaching. His salary was small, and his affairs were further complicated by the long illness of his wife, who died in 1878.