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Picture by Dafna Gazit, Israel Antiquities Authority
I don’t recall any of my elementary-school classmates wanting ahead to head-lice inspection day. However had archaeological progress been a couple of a long time extra superior on the time, the lecturers might need turned it into a serious historical past lesson. For it was on a comb, designed to take away head lice, that researchers in southern Israel just lately discovered the oldest identified sentence written in an alphabet. Invented round 1800 BC, that Canaanite alphabet “was standardized by the Phoenicians in historic Lebanon,” writes the Guardian‘s Ian Pattern, later changing into “the inspiration for historic Greek, Latin and most trendy languages in Europe as we speak.”
The comb itself, dated to round 1700 BC, bears a easy Canaanite message: “Might this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.” As Pattern notes, “historic combs have been constructed from wooden, bone and ivory, however the latter would have been costly, imported luxuries. There have been no elephants in Canaan on the time.”
Regardless of its small measurement, then, this comb should have been a big-ticket merchandise. The New York Occasions‘ Oliver Whang writes that these info have already impressed a brand new set of questions, lots of them not strictly linguistic in nature: “The place was the ivory comb inscribed? Who inscribed it? What goal did the inscription serve?”
As our lice-combating expertise has developed over the millennia, so have our alphabets. From the Canaanite script “the alphabet continued to evolve, from Phoenician to Outdated Hebrew to Outdated Aramaic to Historical Greek to Latin, changing into the idea for as we speak’s trendy English characters.” And that wasn’t its solely path: Korea, the place I dwell, has a very completely different alphabet of its personal, however one which caught on for a similar causes as its distant cousins elsewhere on this planet. The secret’s simplicity, as towards older writing methods through which one character represented one phrase or syllable: “Matching one letter to at least one sound made writing and studying far simpler to be taught,” Whang writes. Not that some college students, even as we speak, wouldn’t undergo the lice comb relatively than apply their ABCs.
Associated content material:
How Writing Has Unfold Throughout the World, from 3000 BC to This Yr: An Animated Map
An Historical Egyptian Homework Project from 1800 Years In the past: Some Issues Are Really Timeless
What the Rosetta Stone Truly Says
Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and tradition. His initiatives embody the Substack e-newsletter Books on Cities, the e book The Stateless Metropolis: a Stroll by means of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles and the video sequence The Metropolis in Cinema. Comply with him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Fb.
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