One would expect the oldest written words found during archaeological excavations to be carved into the face of a stone tablet, or perhaps into the surface of an ancient stone monument. But they can instead be found in a most unlikely place, which is on the surface of a personal care object that was recovered during an excavation in central Israel at the site of the second millennium BC Canaanite city-state of Lachish.
This object was, of all things, a double-edged ivory head-lice comb, which would have been used to help vanquish a feared parasite that can pass easily from person to person once it gains a foothold in someone’s home. And the message delicately carved into the ivory comb’s surface, which is the oldest known example of the written word in the earliest known alphabet, was entirely appropriate to the object that featured it. It read as follows:
“May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.”
The comb itself is a diminutive in size. (Daniel Vanstub/ JJAR)
The completion of the translation of this remarkable good-luck wish was just announced in the open-access Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology , by a team of Israeli archaeologists with spent more than a year deciphering the tiny letters found on the comb.
“The inscription is very human,” study co-author Dr. Yosef Garfinkel, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who worked on the Lachish excavations, told the Guardian. “You have a comb and on the comb you have a wish to destroy lice on the…
