"May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard"

The oldest full sentence in the Canaanite civilization is revealed - engraved on an ivory comb found in southern Israel.

By Jake Austin, 24 March 2023

The lettering was only discovered when the comb was photographed in the archives. Researchers state it reveals new lettering closely tied to ancient Hebrew.

A discovery from last year presents a recorded first complete sentence in the Canaanite alphabet - an ivory comb with an inscription that translates to "May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard". The alphabet is one of the most crucial human inventions in history. Proto-Mesopotamian civilization pioneered the concept, later taking form as cuneiform (as covered before on the ONE blog). A key difference is those most ancient languages, which also includes Egyptian hieroglyphics, is the use of symbols as opposed to letters. While Egyptian scribes learned thousands of symbols for separate ideas, the Canaanite script was an alphabet of sound-based letters used to convey ideas. Alphabet-based language was easier to learn and spread compared to symbols.

The Canaanite alphabet remains influential to this day. The same script used in the rituals to Moloch described in the bible intermingled with Hebrew. The letter "sin", which in Hebrew today is reportedly pronounced the same as "samekh", appears on the tusk. One theory for the origin of the English letter Q is a Canaanite letter depicting a monkey with its tail hanging down.

The comb was likely a luxury item, concluded the archeologists from Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Southern Adventist University, and Lipscomb University. The ivory was from an elephant, inferring its travel by trade to the Levant. Scientists even found parts of an ancient lice's exoskeleton, but were unable to extract DNA.

The civilization contained normal people, concerned about hygiene and writing down ideas and hopes even for the most trivial matters. The historical record in the Abrahamic religions are expanded upon by modern archeology. Thank you for reading!