JERUSALEM –
Israeli archaeologists have discovered an ancient comb relationship again some 3,700 years in the past and bearing what is probably going the oldest identified full sentence in Canaanite alphabetical script, in keeping with an article printed Wednesday.
The inscription encourages folks to comb their hair and beards to rid themselves of lice. The sentence incorporates 17 letters that learn: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.”
Experts say the invention shines new gentle on a few of humanity’s earliest use of the Canaanite alphabet, invented round 1800 B.C. and the inspiration of the all successive alphabetic techniques, corresponding to Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Latin and Cyrillic.
The mundane subject signifies that individuals had bother with lice in on a regular basis life throughout the time — and archaeologists say they’ve even discovered microscopic proof of head lice on the comb.
The comb was first excavated in 2016 at Tel Lachish, an archaeological web site in southern Israel, but it surely was solely late final 12 months when a professor at Israel’s Hebrew University observed the tiny phrases inscribed on it. Details of the find have been printed Wednesday in an article in the Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology.
The lead researcher, Hebrew University archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel, advised The Associated Press that whereas many artefacts bearing the Canaanite script have been discovered through the years, that is the primary full sentence to be found.
Garfinkel mentioned earlier findings of just some letters, possibly a phrase right here and there, didn’t go away a lot room for additional analysis on the lives on the Canaanites. “We did not have sufficient materials,” he mentioned.
The find additionally opens up room for debate in regards to the ancient period, Garfinkel added. The indisputable fact that the sentence was discovered on an ivory comb in the ancient metropolis’s palace and temple district, coupled with the mentioning of the beard, might point out that solely rich males have been in a position to learn and write.
“It is a really human textual content,” Garfinkel mentioned. “It reveals us that individuals did not actually change, and lice did not actually change.”
Canaanites spoke an ancient Semitic language — associated to trendy Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic — and resided in the lands abutting the jap Mediterranean. They are believed to have developed the primary identified alphabetic system of writing.
Finding a whole sentence would additional point out that Canaanites stood out amongst early civilizations in their use of the written phrase. “It reveals that even in probably the most ancient section there have been full sentences” Garfinkel added.
He mentioned consultants dated the script to 1700 B.C. by evaluating it to the archaic Canaanite alphabet beforehand discovered in Egypt’s Sinai desert, relationship again to between 1900 B.C. and 1700 B.C.
But the Tel Lachish comb was discovered in a a lot later archaeological context, and carbon relationship failed to find out its actual age, the article notes.
Austrian archaeologist Felix Höflmayer, an professional on the interval who was not a part of the publication, mentioned this technique of relationship was not definitive.
“There are simply not sufficient securely dated early alphabetic inscriptions at the moment identified,” he mentioned. Nonetheless, he added the invention was extremely important, and can assist solidify Tel Lachish as a middle of the early alphabet growth.
“Seventeen letters preserved on a single object is unquestionably exceptional,” Höflmayer mentioned.