Researchers finally notice a 3,700-year-old inscription on a comb

Here's new fodder for small talk when you run out of weather and traffic commentary: the subject of the oldest sentence ever found in Israel.

Haaretz reports that a 3,700-year-old lice comb, unearthed in 2017, has a barely legible inscription that translates to “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.”

It took researchers six years to notice the archaic proto-Canaanite writing because the letters are just two to three millimeters tall and "very shallowly incised," in the words of a professor who helped direct the excavation project.

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