Lousy break

Because some Canaanite had head lice a few years ago, we know more now about the origins of our alphabet.

Chris Klimek writes in the Smithsonian Magazine about how two archeologists exploring the ancient Canaanite city of Lachish stumbled upon a momentous discovery.

(By the way, a man who was president of the United States until 2021 wrote the other day that something was "mementoes." Yes, we all have our mementoes, and some of them are momentous. Let us pray for the wisdom to tell the difference.)

Anyway, the two scientists, Yosef Garfinkel and Michael Hasel, were combing through an excavation when they found what seemed at first to be a piece of bone.

But then a zooarchaeologist, Edward Maher, figured out that the object was in fact a comb (with many missing teeth), made of ivory. We know it was imported, as there were no elephants running around in Canaan in 1700 BC.

And then! Madeleine Mumcuoglu, an archeologist from Hebrew University discerned 17 faintly inscribed characters on the comb. And Daniel Vainstub, an  Epigraphist (student of inscriptions) at Ben-Gurion University translated the inscription: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.”

The old comb and the slogan it bore now become the bearer of the oldest-known complete sentence in the Canaanite writing system, which was an early improvement over pictorial writing such as Hieroglyphics. From this, we feel our modern Western alphabet is a natural descendant.

 

Hieroglyphics relied on pictures to form letters.

Canaanite used rudimentary letters for the first time.

My cursive signature seems to incorporate both.