Believed to be the oldest known sentence written in the oldest alphabet, the inscription on the luxury item reads: “Let this tusk root out the lice of the hair and beard.” The comb discovered in Laches, a Canaanite city-state in the second millennium BC. and the second most important city in the kingdom of Judah, suggests that people have endured lice for thousands of years and that even the wealthiest were not spared the grim infestation. “The inscription is very human,” said Professor Yosef Garfinkel, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who helped direct the excavations at Lachish. “You have a comb and in the comb you have the desire to destroy the lice in the hair and beard. Today we have all these sprays and modern drugs and poisons. In the past they didn’t have them.” The comb, which measures 3.5cm by 2.5cm, was discovered at the site in 2017, but the shallow engravings on the surface were only spotted in December last year. Analysis of the markings confirmed that the script is Canaanite script, the oldest alphabet, which was invented about 3,800 years ago. Scrap script discovered in 2017. Photo: Daniel Vainstub Attempts to obtain an age for the comb from carbon dating proved futile, but researchers believe it was made around 1700 BC. The comb has worn and lost its teeth, but the remaining stumps show that it once had six widely spaced teeth for removing tangles of hair on one side and 14 closely spaced teeth for removing lice and eggs on the other . Further evidence of the comb’s purpose emerged when the researchers examined it under a microscope and identified the hard outer membranes of the half-millimeter-long pupal stages of head lice. The letters on the comb spell out seven words that constitute the first fully deciphered sentence in a Canaanite dialect written in Canaanite script, the researchers told the Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology. Ancient combs were made of wood, bone and ivory, but the latter would have been expensive, imported luxuries. There were no elephants in Canaan at that time. The world’s first writing systems came from Mesopotamia and Egypt around 3200 BC, but these were not alphabetic. They relied on hundreds of different signs to represent words or syllables and therefore took years to master, said Christopher Rollston, a professor of Northwest Semitic languages at George Washington University in the US. Laches, a leading Canaanite state in the second millennium BC. Photo: Emil Aladjem The oldest alphabet was invented around 1800 BC. by Semitic-speaking people who were familiar with the Egyptian writing system, Rollston said. Known as the Canaanite or early alphabet, the system was used for hundreds of years, particularly in the Levant, and was standardized by the Phoenicians in ancient Lebanon. It became the foundation for Ancient Greek, Latin and most modern languages in Europe today. “The fact that this inscription is about ordinary life is particularly fascinating,” Rollston said. “Throughout human history lice have been a perennial problem. And this inscription beautifully reveals that even the rich and famous in ancient times were not exempt from such problems. We can only hope that this registered comb was useful in doing what it says it was supposed to do – weed out some of those pesky insects.”
