Twenty researchers from the Gulf and France are to take part in a symposium on “The Arabian Gulf and Arabian Peninsula in French 17th and 18th Documents” on May 9 at King Abdul Aziz Darat in Riyadh. Fahd Al-Samari, Secretary General of the Darat and the GCC Document and Research Centers at the GCC, said the symposium is one of three aimed at documenting French reference works related to the history of the Arabian Peninsula and the Arabian Gulf between the 17th and 20th centuries. The documents number “more than three million”, according to Al-Samari, and include letters, commercial records, travel writings and French reports from inside and outside France, such as the French archives in India, United States, Holland, Portugal, Spain and Russia. “There are also French archives in Indian Ocean and African countries that include the memoirs of French presidents over the same two centuries and other documents that touch on, in whatever way, French-Gulf relations and Gulf affairs in that period,” Al-Samari said. “The symposium will support the Arab Documents Library with new historical sources for wider research on an important part of the Arab and Muslim World,” Al-Samari said. The symposium is being organized by the Darat, the GCC Secretariat General of Documents and Studies Centers, and the Sorbonne University in Paris and Abu Dhabi. The GCC Secretariat General of Documents and Studies Centers, based at the King Abdul Aziz Darat, was established in 1967 and held its first meeting in Basra, Iraq.
