Engraved into the side of a nearly 4,000-year-old ivory comb is a simple wish: Get these lice out of my hair.
This faint inscription, written in the early language of the ancient Canaanites, represents the earliest known instance of a complete sentence written using a phonetic alphabet, says archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The writing system of the Canaanites, who lived in a region in the eastern Mediterranean called the Levant until around 2,000 years ago, later served as a major basis for many modern alphabets (SN: 7/27/17). That makes the comb “the most important object I’ve ever found during an excavation,” says Garfinkel. The
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