The oldest sentence written in the world's first alphabet describes a problem that still plagues humans today: head lice. Carved into a tiny ivory comb, the words read: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.”
The writing was inscribed in the language of the Canaanites, a group that lived between approximately 3500 and 1150 B.C.E. in what’s now Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine. Researchers recently published the translation in the Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology.
“The inscription is very human,” co-author Yosef Garfinkel, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel who helped direct the excavations, tells the Guardian’s Ian Sample. “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.”
