FRIENDS OF ASOR WEBINARS
Man-Hunting in the Desert: The Ill-Fated Palmer Sinai Expedition of 1882
Friends of ASOR present the next webinar of the 2024-2025 season on October 9, 2024, at 2:00 pm EDT, presented by Dr. James Fraser. This webinar will be free and open to the public. Registration through Zoom (with a valid email address) is required.
In August 1882, Prof. Edward Palmer of Cambridge University disguised himself as a Bedouin and set out into the Sinai desert carrying £3000 of gold. Prof. Palmer, his colleagues, their servants and the gold were never seen again. While the fate of this expedition—and that of Charles Warren’s celebrated rescue mission—has long captured scholarly imagination, they have recently come into sharper focus with the publication of two books: These Chivalrous Brothers: The Mysterious Disappearance of the 1882 Palmer Sinai Expedition (David Sunderland, 2016) and Captain Gill’s Walking Stick: The True Story of the Sinai Murders (Saul Kelly, 2019). This presentation considers the nature, motivations and failures of this early intelligence operation in light of this new research, including unpublished documents in the archives of the Palestine Exploration Fund in London.
Jamie Fraser is Director of the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in East Jerusalem. He received his PhD from the University of Sydney in 2016, which was published as the monograph Dolmens in the Levant in 2018 and awarded ASOR’s G. Ernest Wright Award for Best Archaeological Publication. Jamie previously served as Curator for the Ancient Levant and Anatolia at the British Museum, where he curated the 2023 exhibition Luxury and Power: Persia to Greece. He directs an excavation project in Jordan investigating a Bronze Age olive oil factory at Khirbet Um al-Ghozlan, and has archaeological experience in Jordan, Syria, Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kashmir, Greece, Cambodia, Australia and the Solomon Islands.
