Archaeologists Find Ancient Combs Containing Messages

Photo Apothecary illustration (photo: dock. Unsplash)

JAKARTA - An ancient comb from 3,700 years ago was recently found by archaeologists from Israel, including the full sentence known in the script for the Canaanite alphabet.

This discovery is not focused on the ancient comb, but on some of the early use of the Canaanite alphabet by mankind in that ancient object, in which the alphabet was discovered around 1800 BC and is the basis of all consecutive alphabet systems, such as Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Latin, and Cyrillic.

The ancient comb was tucked in a sentence encouraging people to comb through their hair and beard in order to clean themselves of ticks.

The sentence contains 17 letters that read, Hopefully these tusks eradicate hamlets and beards. This means that at that time, many people had problems with ticks in their daily lives and archaeologists said they had even found microscopic evidence of ticks on the comb.

The comb was first excavated in 2016 at Tel Lachish, an archaeological site in southern Israel, but only late last year when a major researcher in the discovery and professor at Israel's Hebrew University, Yosef Garfinkel noticed the small words written there.

Launching ABCNews, Thursday, November 10, the details of the findings were published Wednesday November 9 in an article in the Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology.

Garfinkel admits that although many artifacts have been found, this is the first time an ancient object has complete sentences and explains life at that time.

Previous findings, said Garfinkel, were only a few letters and could not be a further research material on the lives of Canaanite people. However, when you find a comb with this complete Canaanite sentence, it will open up space for discussion of how ancient eras were.

The comb was stored both in ancient city palaces and temple districts, coupled with the mention of beards, suggesting that only the rich could read and write at the time.

This is a very humane text. It shows us that people don't really change, and ticks don't really change," said Garfinkel.

Garfinkel emphasized that finding the next complete sentence would show that Canaanite people stand out among early civilizations in the use of written words.

"This shows that even in the most ancient phase there is a complete sentence", said Garfinkel.