مجلة جامعة الأنبار للعلوم الإنسانية (Jun 2024)
The historical roots of the archive in Iraq until 1963
Abstract
Objectives: The research aims to study documentary archives from important departments, given that they contain important data, information and documents about events and general conditions. One of the countries that has been interested in archival work is Iraq because of the desire of many Iraqi historians to keep pace with those countries, as Iraq is the main homeland. For documentary archives, due to the ancient civilization and its cultural heritage since ancient times and in its contemporary history. Methodology: The research includes a brief historical study that gives a clear picture of the historical roots of archival work in Iraq by relying on Iraqi documents, sources, and newspapers that were considered the scientific sources of the research, then focusing on the role of Iraqi historians in collecting, classifying, and archiving documents and making them scientific material to draw from. Researchers and graduate students such as Abdul Razzaq Al-Hassani, Salem Al-Alusi, Saleh Ahmed Al-Ali, Yassin Abdul Karim, and others who later became founders and workers at the Iraqi Center for Document Preservation. Result: The archive constituted a source of various information related to the development of the features of political, social, intellectual, economic and cultural life, from the formation of the Iraqi state, and for this reason the state faced the problem of how to deal with the huge amount of these papers, records and files that are issued daily, but it did not receive any attention from anyone. In order to preserve documents and the necessity of securing them, or to establish an independent department to take care of their preservation and facilitate access to them by historians and researchers, until the destruction law was issued in 1942 AD, to which several amendments were made. Conclusion: A country that does not have an archive is like a patient who has lost his memory. Preserving documents goes back to the University of Baghdad and the urgent need for sources and references that they rely on in historical studies and research and their sense of the importance of documents in historical writings. They also drew attention to the necessity of making use of old papers. preserved in the state ministries and departments, and thus the responsible authorities at the University of Baghdad made unremitting efforts to contact government departments and institutions, urging them to pay attention to old records and files that contain various important information.
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