Oldest known sentence written in first alphabet discovered - on a head-lice comb

Also: Bronze Age comb reveals an ancient frustration with head lice (CNN)

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Source: The Guardian

Oldest known sentence written in first alphabet discovered – on a head-lice comb

Timeless fret over hygiene picked out on engraved Bronze age comb from ancient kingdom of Judah

Ian Sample Science editor
@iansample
Wed 9 Nov 2022 04.00 GMT

It’s a simple sentence that captures the hopes and fears of modern-day parents as much as the bronze age Canaanite who owned the doubled-edged ivory comb on which the words appear.

Believed to be the oldest known sentence written in the earliest alphabet, the inscription on the luxury item reads: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.”

Unearthed in Lachish, a Canaanite city state in the second millennium BCE and the second most important city in the kingdom of Judah, the comb suggests that humans have endured lice for thousands of years and that even the wealthiest were not spared the grim infestations.

“The inscription is very human,” said Prof Yosef Garfinkel, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who helped direct the Lachish excavations. “You have a comb and on the comb you have a wish to destroy lice on the hair and beard. Nowadays we have all these sprays and modern medicines and poisons. In the past they didn’t have those.”

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/nov/09/oldest-known-written-sentence-discovered-on-a-head-lice-comb

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Source: CNN

Bronze Age comb reveals an ancient frustration with head lice

By Katie Hunt, CNN
Published 11:00 PM EST, Tue November 8, 2022

(CNN) — A seven-word inscription discovered by accident on a 3,700-year-old lice comb is the oldest known sentence written in an alphabet, according to a new study.

The inscription written on the ivory comb is in Canaanite, the earliest alphabet, and the source of the Latin one used today to write English and many other European languages. The words are a humble plea, perhaps shared by parents of young children today: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.”

Small clusters of Canaanite letters have been identified on fragments of pottery and arrowheads, but this is the first time scholars have found a complete sentence written in what Yosef Garfinkel, a professor of archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said was the first alphabet-based language, making it a landmark discovery in the history of the human ability to write.

“Nothing like this was found before. It’s not the royal inscription of a king … this is something very human. You’re immediately connected to this person who had this comb,” said Garfinkel, a coauthor of the study that published in the Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology.

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Read more: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/08/world/lice-comb-discovery-earliest-sentence-alphabet-scn/index.html