author
Edward Henry Palmer
1840–1882
A gifted linguist and fearless traveler, he turned deep knowledge of Arabic and the Middle East into books that still attract readers interested in exploration, religion, and cross-cultural scholarship. His life was cut short during a mission in Egypt, giving his story an unusual mix of academic brilliance and real danger.
1 Audiobook
Jerusalem, the City of Herod and Saladin
by Walter Besant, Edward Henry Palmer
About the author
Born in Cambridge in 1840, Edward Henry Palmer became known as an English orientalist, explorer, and scholar of Arabic and Persian. He studied at Cambridge and later taught there, building a reputation for remarkable language ability and for the ease with which he moved between academic study and firsthand travel.
Palmer took part in expeditions in Sinai and the wider Middle East, experiences that shaped books such as The Desert of the Exodus and helped make him a vivid writer as well as a serious scholar. He also produced translations, including a well-known English version of the Qur'an, and wrote on Middle Eastern history and geography for general readers.
In 1882, while on a British mission in Egypt during a time of conflict, he was killed in the Sinai region. That dramatic end has often overshadowed the rest of his career, but his legacy also rests on his range as a linguist, traveler, translator, and interpreter of the cultures he studied.