More than half a decade later, by a stroke of luck, scientists found letters faintly engraved on the object: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and beard.” “People kind of laugh when you tell them what the inscription actually says,” said Michael Hasel, an archaeologist at Southern Adventist University in Tennessee who was involved in the discovery of the comb. But these words turned out to be anything but banal. Dr. Hasel and colleagues dated the comb to around 1,700 BC, meaning this appeal against lice is one of the earliest examples of the writing of the Canaanites, an ancient Near Eastern people credited with developing the early forms of the alphabet that would evolve. in the letters used today in this newspaper. As the scientists explain in an article published Wednesday in the Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology, the 17 letters on the comb constitute the oldest complete, decipherable sentence ever found in an early alphabetic script. “I truly believe this is the most important object ever found in my excavations,” said Yosef Garfinkel, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and co-author of the study who has discovered evidence of King David’s reign during his career. . He paused, then added, a hint of emotion in his voice, “This is the first sentence ever found in the alphabet.” The earliest attested human writing systems appeared around 3,200 BC, with cuneiform in Mesopotamia and hieroglyphs in Egypt. These scripts had hundreds of letters and were largely pictorial. This made them very difficult to learn, but they spread throughout the Near East. At some point, probably around 1,800 BC, a new type of writing appeared in the area based on only a few dozen letters that were repeated and scrambled. Each letter is associated with a single basic sound or phoneme. The development of this early alphabet is not well understood. But Christopher Rolston, who studies Near Eastern languages and writing systems at George Washington University, said there was a consensus that “the alphabet was invented by people who spoke Semitic and were familiar with the Egyptian writing system.” Several centuries later, around 1,100 BC, these earliest alphabetic scripts were adopted by the Phoenicians, who wrote strictly from right to left and standardized the shape and position of the letters. “There is a big misconception among the general public that the Phoenicians invented the alphabet,” Dr Rolston said. “They didn’t.” The alphabet continued to evolve, from Phoenician to Old Hebrew to Old Aramaic to Ancient Greek to Latin, and became the basis for today’s modern English characters. Dr Garfinkel said the DNA of the earliest alphabet could still be found in English and Hebrew. For example, the letter “A” looks a bit like a cow looking at you – two legs supporting a head. It corresponds to the Hebrew letter Aleph, which corresponds to the Semitic word for ox. “You can still see that in ‘A,’” Dr. Garfinkel said. Part of the alphabet’s function came from its simplicity. Matching a letter to a sound made writing and reading much easier to learn. Dr Hasel compared it to the printing press and the internet — whole new communities were able to access information and record history. “The invention of the alphabet was the most important contribution to communication in the last four millennia,” he said. But the discovery of the letters on the tiny ivory comb didn’t start with anyone looking for clues as to how this alphabet came to be. The artifact had been in storage since 2016, when it was recovered from the ruins of the ancient city of Tell Lachsis. Archaeologists digging at the site can inventory thousands of artifacts per week. Earlier this year, Madeleine Mumcuoglu, a parasitologist and archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, put the comb under a microscope to look for remains of lice. “I concentrated on the teeth and not on anything else,” he said. “I had beautiful pictures under the microscope.” But she also took photos of the entire comb with her phone, and when she zoomed in, she saw an etching. Dr. Mumcuoglu sent two of these images to Daniel Vainstub, a paleontologist at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. He was able to distinguish the Canaanite letters. Dr. Hasel and Dr. Garfinkel then sent the actual comb to Dr. Vainstub for a more thorough analysis. All the researchers were amazed that the writing had gone unnoticed for more than five years “Everyone had this comb in their hands and no one saw the inscription,” said Dr. Mumcuoglu. In the following months, Dr. Vainstub compared the inscription’s 17 letters, each less than a tenth of an inch long, to other ancient writings. Because examples of Canaanite writing around the same time period are rare and fragmentary, and because many of the engravings on the comb were faint, the work was laborious. But the writing of the inscription on an ivory comb seemed to indicate a single translation. Dr. Vainstub said that once he caught the word “lice,” he knew he had it figured out. “This is brilliant and judicious and careful scholarship,” said Dr. Rollston, who was not involved in the study. While the discovery and decipherment of the inscription amounts to a major archaeological advance in the study of the alphabet, none of the researchers claim that this find opens the doors to the field. In fact, there are many new questions to be asked: There were no elephants in Canaan, so where was the ivory comb carved? Who wrote it? What purpose did the inscription serve? Dr. Garfinkel said that finding the comb with a plea for lice was like “finding a plate that says, ‘Put food on this plate.’ It is simple, functional and reflective, in a way, of our nature. “It’s a very human thing,” he said. “What did you expect; A love song? A recipe to make pizza?’
