An artifact was found by archaeologists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel and other institutions engraving what is believed to be the oldest phrase in the world’s first alphabet, invented around 1800 BC by the Canaanites, a people who lived in the East. Average.
The thing in question is a double-edged ivory comb, which has to say the following: “This is stuck. Pull the lice out of the hair and beard.” Remains have been found at Lachish, a Canaanite city-state from the second millennium BC and the second most important city in the Kingdom of Judah.
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According to the British newspaper Watchmanthe results indicate that humans have suffered from lice for thousands of years, and that even the rich are not spared the plague.
“The writing is very humane,” said Professor Joseph Garfinkel, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “You have a comb and in the comb you have the desire to eliminate lice in the hair and beard. Nowadays we have all these modern sprays, medicines and poisons. They used to not have that.”
The comb, which researchers believe was made around 1700 BC, was found in 2017, but the inscriptions on the surface were not discovered until December of last year – analysis of the signs confirmed that the writing was indeed Canaanite.
At about 3.5 cm by 2.5 cm, it is worn out and its edges are lost. However, the remaining stumps show that the body had six teeth widely spaced for detangling on one side and 14 teeth spaced together to remove lice on the other.
first writing systems
The world’s first writing systems originated in Mesopotamia and Egypt around 3200 BC, but they were not alphabetical. Christopher Rollston, professor of Northwest Semitic languages at George Washington University in the US, explained to The Guardian that they relied on hundreds of different signs to represent words or syllables, and as such, took years to master.
The expert added that the oldest alphabet was invented around 1800 BC by Semitic speakers who were familiar with the Egyptian writing system. It was used for hundreds of years and standardized by the Phoenicians in ancient Lebanon. Over time, it became the basis of ancient Greek, Latin and most modern languages in Europe today.
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