USA Today (among other outlets) celebrated the discovery of an inscription in the oldest known alphabet – a 3,700-year-old Canaanite ivory comb engraved with 17 letters spelling out a wish to keep lice out of your beard:
The sentence contains 17 letters that read: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.”
Experts say the discovery shines new light on some of humanity’s earliest use of the Canaanite alphabet, invented around 1800 B.C. and the foundation of the all successive alphabetic systems, such as Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Latin and Cyrillic.
The mundane topic indicates people had trouble with lice in everyday life during the time – and archaeologists say they have even found microscopic evidence of head lice on the comb.
The comb was first excavated in 2016 at Tel Lachish, an archaeological site in southern Israel, but it was only late last year when a professor at Israel’s Hebrew University noticed the tiny words inscribed on it. Details of the find were published Wednesday in an article in the Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology.