SCRATCHING UP A FIND

Archaeologists Unearth Ancient Comb With Inscription About Pesky Head Lice

The ancient comb dates all the way back to 1700 B.C.

Israeli archaeologists have found an ancient comb containing possibly the oldest known sentence in the Canaanite alphabet, a language that spawned modern language systems, such as Arabic and Hebrew. The sentence is dated to 1700 B.C., telling people to comb their hair and beards to get rid of lice. It translates to, “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard,” according to an article published Wednesday in the Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology. Hebrew University archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel said this artifact contains the first full Canaanite sentence discovered. Archaeologists said they found microscopic evidence of head lice on the comb, which was first excavated in 2016 in southern Israel. “It is a very human text,” Garfinkel said. “It shows us that people didn’t really change, and lice didn’t really change.”