The World’s Oldest Sentence Written In An Alphabet Has Been Decoded By Scholars. It’s A Very Specific Warning… About Lice
You would be mistaken to assume that the earliest scribes of humans who used the alphabet recorded any sort of generational knowledge or a significant message intended to be transmitted down the ages. On a little ivory comb found etched with the oldest decipherable entire sentence ever discovered, dating to 1,700 B.C.E., at the Tel Lachish archeological site in central Israel in 2016, the writing was discovered. “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard,” was written in slender characters. “People kind of laugh when you tell them what the inscription actually says,” one of the archaeologists on the project, Michael Hasel, of the Southern Adventist University in Tennessee, told the New York Times. But the message is also remarkably relatable—especially for parents of small children. The inscription on the ancient ivory comb, dated to 1,700 B.C.E., reading “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard” in the Canaanite alphabet, the oldest kn