Palmer, Edward Henry

Palmer, Edward Henry an English Orientalist, was born at Cambridge, August 7, 1840. In 1868 he took part in the expedition for exploring the Sinai territory, and made an examination of the names of places, traditions, and antiquities of Arabia Petraea. With the same object in view he explored, in connection with Tyrwhitt Drake, the desert Et-Tih and Moab, in 1869 and 1870. Upon his return to England he was made professor of Arabic at Cambridge in 1871. In 1878 he settled at London, and in 1882 went on a secret mission, at the instance of the English government, into the desert east of the Suez canal. On his second trip through the desert he was killed, in October, 1882. Palmer published an Arabic translation of Thomas Moore's Paradise and the Peri (1865): — Oriental Mysticism (1867): — Report on the Bedawizn of Sinai and their Traditions (1870): — The Desert of the Exodus (1871): — A History of the Jewish Nation (1874; Germ. transl. Gotha, 1876): — A Grammar of the Arabic Language (London, 1874): — A Persian-English Dictionary (1876): — Life of Haroun Al Raschid (1878), and for Max Muller's Sacred Books of the East he translated the Koran. See Besant, Life and Achievements of Edward Henry Palmer (London, 1883). (B.P.)