This paper examines the ambiguous political work of revolutionary archives in the wake of the 2011 Egyptian revolution. Following Mubarak's exit in February 2011 there immediately emerged multiple efforts--affiliated variously with universities, the state, activist groups, and others-- to amass documentation of the revolution in the form of oral histories, photographs, paraphernalia and material debris, broadsheets, underground newspapers, online communication ("tweets," etc.), and other media. What are we to make of the appearance of this widespread and instantaneous will to archive? Three questions seem central. First, what do these kinds of memory practices suggest about the perceived temporality of the revolution and its relation to a future politics? Second, what contesting visions of the political and of a public sphere are apparent in the diversity of archival projects, and in particular, in those various ways in which "the revolutionary" is therein classified, delimited, and performed? Finally, what do such archival projects posit about the workings of memory and its claims on revolutionary subjects and/or post-Mubarak citizens? In exploring these and other questions, this paper draws on ethnographic and textual material gathered in Cairo between January and December 2011, as well as on theoretical work by Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Bowker, and Ann Stoler.