The tiny ivory comb comes from ancient ruins in central Israel and is about the size of a child’s thumb. Some of its teeth were broken. It was so encrusted in mud that the archaeologist who found it originally added it to a pocket of bones of all kinds.
More than half a decade later, by a stroke of luck, scientists found the words faintly engraved on the object: “May this tusk kill lice on hair and beard.”
Michael Hasel, an archaeologist at Adventist University in Tennessee who was involved in the discovery of the comb, said: “People will laugh when you tell them the inscription actually says it. what.
But those words turned out to be nothing out of the ordinary. Dr Hasel and his colleagues dated the comb to around 1,700 BC, meaning this appeal against lice is one of the oldest examples of human writing The Canaanites, an ancient Near Eastern people are credited with developing the earliest forms of the alphabet that would develop. on the letters used in this newspaper today. As scientists explain in a article Published Wednesday in the Jerusalem Journal of Archeology, the 17 letters on the comb form the oldest decipherable full sentence ever found in an early alphabet.
“I really think this is the most important object ever found in my excavations,” said Yosef Garfinkel, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a co-author of the study. evidence has been unearthed of the reign of King David during his career.
He paused, then added, with a hint of emotion in his voice: “This is the first sentence ever found in the alphabet.”
The earliest confirmed human writing systems appeared around 3,200 BC, with cuneiform in Mesopotamia and hieroglyphics in Egypt. These scripts have hundreds of letters and are mostly pictures. That made them very difficult to learn, but they were widespread throughout the Near East. At some point, probably close to 1,800 BC, a new type of writing appeared in the area that relied on only a few dozen letters being repeated and shuffled around. Each letter is related to a basic sound or phoneme.
The development of this first alphabet is still poorly understood. But Christopher Rollston, who studies languages and writing systems of the Near East at George Washington University, says there is consensus that “the alphabet was invented by Semitic speakers who were familiar with it. with the Egyptian writing system”.
Several centuries later, around 1,100 BC, the first scripts of this alphabet were adopted by the Phoenicians, who wrote strictly from right to left and standardized the shape and stance of the alphabet. letters. Dr Rollston said: “There is a misconception in the community that the Phoenicians invented the alphabet. “They did not.”
The alphabet continued to evolve, from Phoenician to Old Hebrew, Ancient Aramaic to Ancient Greek to Latin, becoming the basis for modern English characters today. Dr. Garfinkel says that the DNA of the earliest alphabet can still be found in English and Hebrew. For example, the letter “A” looks like a cow staring at you – two goddamn legs. It corresponds to Hebrew letter Aleph, which corresponds to the Semitic word for ox. “You can still see that in the ‘A’,” says Dr. Garfinkel.
Part of the alphabet’s functionality comes from its simplicity. Combining a letter into a sound makes learning to write and read a lot easier. Dr Hasel compared it to print and internet – entirely new communities that have been able to access information and record history. “The invention of the alphabet is the most important contribution to communication over the past four millennia,” he said.
But spotting the letters on the tiny ivory comb doesn’t start with anyone looking for clues as to how this alphabet came about. The artifact has been in storage since 2016, when it was collected from the ruins of the ancient city of Tel Lachish. Archaeologists digging at the site can inventory thousands of items each week.
Earlier this year, Madeleine Mumcuoglu, a parasitologist and archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, placed the comb under a microscope to look for remnants of lice. “I focus on my teeth and not on anything else,” she says. “I’ve got good pictures under the microscope.”
But she also took a picture of the entire comb with her phone, and when she zoomed in, she saw an engraving.
Dr Mumcuoglu sent these two photographs to Daniel Vaistub, an archaeologist at Ben-Gurion University in the Negev in Israel. He could distinguish Canaanite letters. Dr. Hasel and Dr. Garfinkel then sent the actual comb to Dr. Vaistub for more thorough analysis. All the researchers were surprised that the handwriting had gone unnoticed for more than 5 years
Dr Mumcuoglu said: “Everybody had this comb in their hand and no one saw the inscription.
Over the next few months, Dr. Vaistub compared the 17 letters in the inscription, each less than a tenth of an inch long, with other ancient scripts. Because examples of Canaanite writing from the same time period are rare and fragmentary, and because many of the comb inscriptions are faint, this work is difficult. But the writing on the ivory comb seems to point to a single translation. Dr. Vaistub said that, after he found the word “lice”, he knew he had found it.
Dr Rollston, who was not involved in the study, said: “This is a wonderful and insightful and careful scholarship.
While the discovery and decipherment of this inscription is an important step forward in archeology in the study of the alphabet, none of the researchers claim that the discovery opened the door to the alphabet. this field. In fact, new questions arise: There are no elephants in Canaan, so where is the ivory comb carved? Who recorded it? What is the purpose of the text?
Dr. Garfinkel says finding the comb with a plea against lice is like “finding a plate that says ‘Put food on this plate’.” In some ways, it’s simple, functional, and a reflection of who we are.
“It was something very human,” he said. “What were you looking forward to? A love song? A recipe for pizza?”
