When we consider the movement of modern Arabic literature, the name of Taha Husain comes to our mind. None can doubt the importance of his role; indeed some say that, but for Taha Husain, the renaissance of literature in Egypt would not have reached its present level. Through his works and the wide and various fields of his activities, we would like to discover what he has thought in the confused state at the beginning of the 20th century and how he has expressed his thoughts.
Then we refer to the judgement of several people about Taha Husain to make our conception of his image more accurate.
al-Ayyam is regarded as the most significant among his numerous works to help us in this purpose. Taha Husain's biographical novel, al-Ayyam depicts an Egyptian boy's inner experience. This work is recognized as one of the most distinguished novels in modern Egypt. We shall try to catch the flavour of this work from the literary point of view.

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It is almost impossible for us to define the origins of singing and poetry and the like, because they hide themselves behind the mist of their ancient legends and disclose no real features.
Although somewhat fruitless to investigate, the origin must be observed along the history of music and literature. Arabic songs, as I consider, rest their primitive form on either Huda' (caravan song) or Buka' (lamenting song). Each has its affirmative reasons to be first, but here I dare to choose the former as the more suitable one and try to report in this essay the origin and early development of Arabic songs, assuming that Huda' would be in typical concordance with Arabian nature, that is “DESERT”. When travelling in the desert what relations can exist between camel and camel-driver in the deep silence of the desert in addition to the footsteps of the camels and rhythmical swaying on the camel-back?

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In the studies of the Old Testament prophecy it has been much disputed whether the so-called writing prophets, whose words betray that they were men of a marked individuality, had their official position, (somewhat in the same way as it is the case with the cult-officials, ) within the cultic institutions where the old traditions were dominant all over. In this paper we try to see this point in the case of the prophet Jeremiah to prove that he was basically independent of any such institution in his activity, by means of pointing out the ways peculiar to him in his acceptance of the sacred traditions.
The hypothesis is that the form of prophetic sayings originated in the secular legal proceedings (as it is indicated by H. Gunkel, recently with some modifications by H. J. Boecker), which enables us to look at the structure of prophetic sayings as composed of two main parts, viz., complaint (Anklage) and the declaration of judgment (Gerichtsankündigung). As complaints are possible only when they are made on the basis of certain criteria, which have been probably formulated out of traditions and whose contents have been determined by them, we may expect that we would be able to meet these very traditions through analysis of the prophetic complaints.
In order to determine the traditions of the nature described above in so far as they are accepted by this particular prophet and appear in his complaints, we analyse them with the view of singling out their cores on the presumption that they would have the characteristics similar at least to the kernel of the complaints part in secular legal proceedings.
Twenty-one cores which we have singled out from Jeremiah's complaints almost unanimously run that people have left Jahwe, their God, but not, as usually considered, that people have broken the laws of Jahwe. Here we see an instance of free interpretation given to the Covenant tradition which had in all probability been coupled with the laws and accepted as the basis for the laws. Such freedom as we have seen in our prophet's interpretation of the tradition proves his independence from the institutional restrictions.

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The writer tried to date the sherd from palaeographical point of view. It resulted in the first half of the eighth century B. C. This is contrasted with the examinations of pottery typology and stratigraphy, which have concluded some decades earlier date than the palaeographical one. The scripts show remarkable Aramaic characteristics, although they reserves tenaciously some so typical characteristics of the ancient Hebrew scripts that they seem not to be inscribed by the hands trained for orthodox Aramaic writing.

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The third season's work of the Japanese Expedition to Tel Zeror was carried out under the direction of Prof. Dr K. Ohata in the summer of 1967, when a piece of a broken steatite bowl was found in stratum IX (thel late tenth to the early ninth centuries B. C.). We were not able to delve into studying this piece in full in the report “Tel Zeror III” which was published in 1970.
Here is the first half of our comprehensive survey of the parallels as well as the final result of the restoration of the Tel Zeror piece.
It is very similar to those which are owned by the Museum fuer Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, and the National Museum, Copenhagen. Thus the hand with four fingers on the surface of the bowl was restored as the left foreleg of the lion-protoma which mounted the hollow “handle”. The statement in “Tel Zeror III” that the hand is “human” is now discarded. There has been found another type of the “human” hand (palm) decoration, but in fact it was also not human, but must have been devine.
On the other hand, the chronological analysis of the decorative elements of the parallels from Syria and Palestine has led us to the conclusion that their original home was not Egypt, nor Canaan, nor Anatolia; that most elements came from the artistic motifs of Hyksos and Hurrians in the Bronze Age; that they were synthesized in North Syria in the Early Iron Age under the strong influence of the decorative idea of the Urartu and Luristan arts.
The cardinal points which are to be discussed in the second half of our study will be: that the ritual for which these bowls were used was not incense burning but libation; that this Iron Age cult was Nordic and that for the worship of violence and fury; that the cult was imported by Aramaean and Neo-Hittite people to the land of Israel.

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