is the outcome of the uncountable questions raised by the past, making the many aspects of learning history itself questionable. Until today, historians rely on books, scientific or cultural journals, and newspapers, among other things, to provide a glimpse into what took place in the past or to offer an explanation of a historical event. With today's technological breakthroughs, there are new ways of drawing attention to history. In the past, one main purpose of documenting history was to praise a ruler or glorify a state. Therefore, historians did not always pay much attention to documenting the daily lives of human beings, and history became selective. Today, the study of history is more progressive, and it is defined as the science that studies the conditions of past communities, or the study of human evolution, and the achievements of civilisations and their impacts. Books of history are stories narrated by historians who provide treasures of knowledge and take us back to the past. This is not all that matters to historians today, however, as the contemporary definition of history is formed out of the need to not only obtain documentation about the past, but also to present an interpretation of its events. Why do we care about history? The study of history can be conducted for scientific purposes, or to know the events of the past, or to examine the positive and negative sides of the history of mankind, or simply because it is a vital cultural component of any population. All the above can provide us with answers to the questions we face today; in fact, a realistic answer would be that all the above explain our interest in history. But no matter what the reason, history is a key ingredient in educating societies and guiding them to understanding the rules of peace and war, the management of state affairs, and planning for the future. Following on from this point, and because of its connection to state affairs, the concept of history is transformed from being a theoretical science to a practical one. Thinking about history often comes in the form of questions like what is history and to whom does it belong. Such questions are necessary for the presence of history. If the past was problem- or gap-free, then the mission of historians would be complete, but in fact history is considered as some sort of debate between the past and the present and between what has already happened and what will happen in the future. Historians tell stories to convince readers of ideas. They aim to provide the truth even if it offends some. They present works that aim at attracting attention, in supplying a captivating scenario that fits the context of the past. However, history is not just a story being narrated: it is confusing and disorganised, reaching the same degree of complexity as the life we live today. It offers a feeling of confusion through the endeavour to reach a model, context, meaning and story that is easy to understand. The definition and content of history has changed dramatically since the times of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus until today, but the real change came in the transition between the Industrial Revolution and the contemporary state. This transformation defined history as one of the humanities and the sciences in its modern form, and it acts as one of the mechanisms of power that works on controlling society through education and rearranging the memory of that society and its perceptions. If history has changed throughout the ages, why can't it change again now? The past can be retrieved for the present, and a connection between them can be established, especially because the process of writing history is full of questions, and we are always drawn back to the past, looking to history for information about people who did not live the way we live today. To grasp the idea of connecting the worlds of the past and present together, we need to understand the transformation resulting from various technological developments in the world of documenting history. Printing, for example, changed the life of mankind. So did the telegraph and television in increasing literacy and culture, changing the nature of communication between societies and transmitting events and facts to people no matter where they were located. By applying such technologies, documents came to light that were an excellent means of recording and narrating history, especially in World Wars I and II.
DOCUMENTATION: In the past, folk tales played the role of today's documentaries in entertaining audiences, but their narrators often added their own touches to the story, an act similar to what happens today in history on television. As the development of the human skill of documentation emerges out of the will to make use of the accumulated stock of knowledge and human experience, history can be seen as the memory of a community. Therefore, the future of history will not rely only on texts available in books, but it will also take new forms such as illustrated materials that may include pictures and graphics or CDs or DVDs of events. In the past, nations generally stored their historical documents in national archives. Today, each country seeks to provide such documents to everyone, often making them available on the Internet. Manuscripts are often available through digital libraries, and every nation in the future will likely have its own comprehensive history websites. The role of historians in this case will be confined to academic studies and specialised research, or in helping in the provision of historical material on the Internet, in addition to explaining history and its lacunae. The US Library of Congress has become interested in this subject and has sought to establish a universal heritage library in cooperation with the Bibliotheca Alexandrina as a strategic partner and the UN cultural organisation UNESCO. This library, the “World Digital Library”, contains items from the heritage of each nation, and each participates by submitting its best historical and archival documents. Establishing history websites, digital libraries, or a historical memory for each country on the Internet has many advantages. It responds to young people's attempts to form their culture and knowledge through digital media and not the previously used forms of transmitting knowledge and science alone. The variety of historical sources and materials available also makes the Internet a perfect method to connect materials together and provide integrated results for only one search item from various entries. Radio and television broadcasting, Internet archives, journalism, photographs, films, and documentaries are today's historical sources, in addition to the traditional ones of books, periodicals, documents, coins and stamps. All these means can be searched to find targeted objects on history websites. Main subjects can also be used as search categories on the homepages of history websites, and they may include political, economic, social, cultural and scientific affairs, in addition to major events and public figures. Searches can also be carried out according to selected materials, such as pictures, documents, films, audio recordings, speeches, newspapers, magazines, maps, stamps, books, medals, covers, posters and advertisements. All the above should be enhanced by objective historical data that simply explain those things that are related to the country in question. In addition, a special icon can be added to include articles and studies conducted by historians to explain a certain issue or event. Reading history from books might only reflect the views of their writers. A book does not interact with the reader, is limited in distribution, and is of interest only to the current generations. A history website, on the other hand, can offer readers the opportunity to compose their own views through the available material; its information can be corrected and modified; and it is interactive and enables readers to add their own material. It is not limited, and it has a variety of applications that serve one subject. History website-users can interact with each other via e-mail, or by accessing the subject of any historical event or matter for discussion, especially controversial historical ones. Digital websites can also be used as national registers for keeping what is related to the history of a nation in a memory form that does not vanish or burn or disappear for any other reason. In the same way that documents can be saved in national archives, televised materials can be archived at television stations, and money is kept in central banks, a digital library becomes the keeper of materials related to the memory of the nation. This digital historical memory is a sort of film that interacts with the memory of its spectators who will likely forget some of its scenes and remember others in certain situations. Such historical memory will take nations back in years to retrieve the past that they were not part of. They did not witness their countries at the beginning of their modern renaissance, and they did not observe their ancestors' fight for rights. It will be possible to display scenes from the daily lives of our great grandfathers in detail. We will be able to visit their cities and villages and see them as actual people who fight, suffer, and struggle. This is how the future of history will be: images from that past brought to the future generations through computer screens. I believe that this should be the way we introduce history to society in the coming years.
THE MEMORY OF HUMANITY: One question that arises every now and then regards the question of how knowledge grows. Today, a new concept has been proposed that challenges the prevailing notion that biology alone has led to the evolution of mental skills. It demonstrates that abilities such as creativity, linguistic skills and work abilities are the outcome of a continuous process of cultural interaction with the world we live in, be it with other people or other physical objects. This notion maintains that the human brain is in a constant state of flux, interacting with every variable offered by life, whether cultural or in the form of objects or new technologies. This is similar to how humans once interacted with the innovation of papyrus to record their daily lives and elevated transactions between them to a higher status of civilisational achievement. It is also their daily interaction with mobile phones today, with their multiple technologies that have changed concepts of communication and information transfer. Archaeologists assume that the first humans appeared on Earth around 200,000 years ago, of which 140,000 years passed without any great transformations or the emergence of steps predicting progress. What led to this transformation in the human ability to think and innovate, such as led to the development of stone tools and cave drawings? This question created much controversy among the scholars at a debate held at Cambridge University in the UK in 2007 entitled “The Wise Human Brain”. Those maintaining that the human brain had developed biologically said that it had taken humans 140,000 years for their brains to grow. However, during this long period of time, human communities formed, groups became tribes, and humans gained experience in moving as groups in forests and wildernesses. The experience of dealing with their surroundings required many years for the early humans' memory to begin retaining memories of the past, learning about the present, and planning and conceptualising the future. And the difference between humans and animals, in terms of mental ability, is the ability to translate human communal life into a force for the good of all humans. This is far more effective than the motion of groups of animals, whose role is either limited to escaping other predatory animals or launching individual attacks on other animals. Humans early on learnt to cooperate in many tasks, such as using the united force of a number of individuals to move heavy objects or to hunt together. Here the gap between humans and animals appeared, for the latter are only able to imitate, whereas the former managed to develop their skills over many years. The ability to learn is the most prominent human ability, and it helped the early humans to develop their memory and build cumulative experiences on its repertoire, whereas animals learn from random observations of what other animals do. It is very rare for animals to recognise the value of innovation. Human beings early on developed the ability to predict the intentions of others. In the process of instruction, for instance, both teacher and student realise the intentions of the other. The student's perception of the teacher is not a random observation, for the alert student adds to himself more than just observation and develops a form of reasoning about what is being presented. The process of learning thus becomes more effective. Dwight Read, an anthropologist at UCLA in the US, has maintained that the decisive moment in the history of the development of human civilisation emerged 10,000 years ago, when the relationship between humans and the objects surrounding them changed drastically. It was during this time that groups of hunters and gatherers exchanged tools for the domestication of animals. They started building barns for these animals and cultivating and reaping crops, instead of simply picking fruit off trees. With this, human actions turned into accomplishments. Read adds that “solving problems became an alternative to moving from place to place”. This led to the emergence of the ability to learn systematically, the ability to work, and the ability to solve problems. The ability of the mind to adjust with cultural changes emerged, and human genius was born. Posing another question about the relationship between the human ability to innovate and language, researcher Dietrich Stout scanned the brains of three anthropologists making tools similar to those of the Stone Age. He concluded that the areas of the anthropologists' brains that became active during this process were the self-same areas used in language. Stout maintained that “the formation of a complex sentence and the making of a tool are similar challenges, and hence the main process underlying both is similar as well, for it depends on overlapping areas of the brain.” Scott Frey from the University of Oregon in the US studied patients with brain injuries and found after scanning healthy individuals that the areas of the left hemisphere of the brain are decisive in the human ability to use tools. These areas also function as a driving force for our ability to produce signs and symbols, and if these areas sustain damage, the human ability to move is impaired. The speech areas in the human brain show that language is a principle component in humans, just like the other senses that have similar centres in the brain. Thus, it is possible to claim that language is a purely human innovation, a statement that may need further proof as to its validity. Language, at the beginning, was as limited as the human need of it. It was only slowly that humans developed language, adding new vocabulary items to it that reflected the development of daily life. Language is thus a living organism that evolves and daily acquires something new. At the beginning of human civilisation language was nothing but a means of communication between individuals, then between one group and other groups, and then among nations. With the increase and advancement of humans, languages diversified and interacted with surrounding environments. The ability of humans to think distinguishes them from other beings. The areas responsible for thinking are located in the outer cortex of the brain. Together with the centres of memory in the brain, they help us to connect the past and the present and visualise the future. The question is why the individual did not develop his memory biologically as the earliest primitive humans or the caveman did. Some scientists believe that memory in these early humans developed biologically. Or were humans created with memory as an integral part of them?
THE FUTURE OF HISTORY: The past raises many questions, and it has a science that studies it, namely history, which in turn has also become an area of many interesting questions. For these reasons, history books are buried treasures. They are detailed works narrated by historians. These books often overwhelm us, for they bring us happiness and make us nostalgic for the past. This is not all there is to do for contemporary historians, however, for we do not only need to present the past: we also need to explain and interpret it. To attain a broader context for a story is not simply limited to its sequential events, but relates also to the significance of these events, in particular since the aims of history today are much broader and more diversified. Historians narrate stories, seeking to convince with their ideas. The methods they follow are based on truth; they present it fairly, even though it may offend. They also have to arrange their stories chronologically and geographically, presenting works that attract attention in an attempt to present an interesting and entertaining narrative that is in agreement with the past. We may conclude that the past is not merely the story that is narrated, but that it is in its entirety muddled and disarranged to a certain extent and as complicated as the life we are living now. History creates a feeling of bewilderment, due to the endeavour to find a model, a context, a meaning and stories for the reader. 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The writer is head of the Central Projects and Services Sector at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.
