A group of Israeli and US experts disclosed on Wednesday that the first sentence ever found in the language of the Canaanites, a people who formerly lived in the ancient Near East, was a term used to treat lice.
May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard, says a 17-letter inscription on an ivory comb that dates to roughly 1,700 BC, according to a research that was published in the Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology.
The letters combine to form seven words that, when written in the Canaanite script, for the first time give us a full, trustworthy phrase in a Canaanite dialect, according to the study’s authors, who include archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The Canaanite alphabet, which is said to have originated in what are now known as Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, eventually served as a significant foundation for many modern languages. This feature made it possible for Garfinkel to refer to the comb as “the most important thing” he has ever unearthed. It was found at the Tel Lachish excavation site in south-central Israel five years ago.
He was reported in the media as saying, “This is a watershed in the history of the human capacity for writing.”
Lachish, originally the second-most significant city in the historical kingdom of Judah, has yielded 10 Canaanite inscriptions to far. But none of them made a whole phrase. Other places’ inscriptions similarly have only single-word entries.
The comb was a “highly premium ornament,” according to Garfinkel, because ivory was a costly material in ancient times. The experts feel that the fact that the item still contains evidence of lice on it illustrates the fact that even persons with high social rank experienced parasitic infections in ancient times.
Although the teeth of the comb are broken, its base demonstrates that nothing has changed in the way head-lice combs have been made over the course of thousands of years.
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