Edward Henry Palmer

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.

[1] 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.

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).

[citation needed] Early in 1882, Palmer was asked by the government to go to the East and assist the Egyptian expedition by his influence over the Arabs of the El-Tih desert (for definition see here).

He was appointed interpreter-in-chief to the force in Egypt, and from Suez he was again sent into the desert with Captain William Gill and Flag-Lieutenant Harold Charrington to procure camels and gain the allegiance of the sheikhs by considerable presents of money.

His brilliant scholarship is displayed rather in the works he wrote in Persian and other Eastern languages than in his English books, which were generally written under pressure.