Israeli researchers have discovered the oldest complete sentence in the Canaanite language found to date, inscribed on a 3,700-year-old lice comb, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem announced on Wednesday. Archaeologists from the Hebrew University and Southern Adventist University in the United States unearthed the comb, made from elephant tusk ivory, in 2017 at Tel Lachish, around 25 miles southwest of Jerusalem in southern Israel.
The inscription – 17 Canaanite letters measuring around 1 to 3 mm each engraved shallowly on the 3.5 cm x 2.5 cm comb – went unnoticed until recently, and was then deciphered at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba. The letters form seven words in Canaanite that read: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.”
The double-sided comb, a luxury item made from ivory imported from Egypt, has on one side 14 fine teeth for the removal of lice and their eggs. On one of the teeth, the remains of head lice were found. The other side of the comb has the bases of six thicker teeth, mostly broken off, for untangling the hair.
Canaanite, a subgroup of the Northwest Semitic languages, is a group of closely related, mutually intelligible dialects of which Hebrew remains the only living example. It is considered the first language group to be written using an alphabet script, which emerged around 3,800 years ago, just a century before the comb was made.