CAIRO - The website of Egypt's Contemporary Memory Project at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina is offering, for the first time, British documents on Egypt's contemporary history, the project's supervisor Khaled Azab said. The documents, some of which are more than a hundred years old, have been obtained through their original source, the archives of the British Public Records Office near London. The rare documents cover various parts of Egypt's modern and contemporary history, and embrace many fields, political, economic, cultural and social, Azab added, noting that a team of researchers was working on indexing them. They will bring the total number of documents in the project to 20,000. “What is new about these British documents is that they reveal, for the first time, secrets and facts pertaining to many of the Egyptian files that lacked clear vision,” Azab said. They even include the original Arabic and English copies of accords between Britain and Egypt during the British occupation of the country. For instance, they include the original copies of documents related to the notorious Denshwai incident, June 13, 1906 (involving British Army officers and local villagers), including the letters exchanged between some of the then members of the British House of Lords and the chief judge in the case, researcher at the Egypt's Contemporary Memory Project, Safaa Khalifa said.Among many others, there are historic documents relating to 19th century Egypt, the digging of the Suez Canal, the 1919 Revolution, the draft of the 1923 Constitution and Arabic and English copies of the 1954 Anglo-Egyptian Agreement, under which British troops would leave the country.
