Oldest known written sentence discovered – on a head-lice comb

It is a simple sentence that captures the hopes and fears of modern day parents as much as the bronze age Canaanite who owned the double-edged ivory comb.

The inscription on the item is believed to be the oldest known sentence written in the early alphabet.

According to the comb found in the second most important city in the kingdom of Judah, humans have been plagued with lice for thousands of years.

Prof Yosef Garfinkel is an Archeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. You have a comb and you want to kill the bugs on the hair and beard. Modern medicines and poisons are available today. They didn't have those in the past

The shallow engravings on the surface of the comb were only noticed in December of last year. The writing was found to be from the earliest alphabet, the Canaanite script.

The comb is thought to have been made around 1700 BCE, despite attempts to get an age from carbon dating. The comb was once used to remove hair tangles on one side and was used to remove eggs on the other side.

When researchers looked at the comb under a microscope, they found the nymph stages of head lice.

According to the researchers in the Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology, the first completely deciphered sentence in a Canaanite dialect can be found in the letters on the comb.

The ancient combs were made from wood, bone and ivory, but they would have cost a lot. There were no animals in the area.

The world's first writing systems were not alphabetic. Christopher Rollston is a professor of northwest Semitic languages at George Washington University.

The earliest alphabet was created by people who were familiar with the Egyptian writing system. The system was used for hundreds of years and was standardised by the Phoenicians. The foundation for ancient Greek, Latin and most modern languages in Europe was created there.

Rollston said that the inscription is interesting because it's about ordinary life. Lice have been a problem since the beginning of time. The inscription shows that the rich and famous were not exempt from such problems. We can only hope that this comb was useful in getting rid of some of these insects.