The Canaanites who inhabited the Land of Israel for much of the biblical period likely spoke a language almost indistinguishable from ancient Hebrew—as were the many related tongues spoken in what is now Jordan and Lebanon. Originally the Canaanites used a 29-letter alphabet, thought to be the precursor to the 22-letter alphabet used for the earliest Hebrew. Amanda Borschel-Dan describes the recent discovery of one of the earliest inscriptions in this language, found on an ivory comb used to remove lice:
According to the epigrapher Daniel Vainstub, the inscription dates to circa the 17th century BCE, which is about four centuries prior to the settlement of the Israelites in the land of Canaan. The inscription, “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard,” is a plea of the most mundane and eternally valid kind. Lice . . . is after all the third of the ten plagues of Egypt.
The inscription contains seventeen tiny, 1-to-3mm pictographic letters that form seven words. The scribe etched them into the ivory in upside-down rows as he flipped the comb in his hand looking for blank space. The result is quasi-professional, according to Vainstub: the letters become progressively smaller and lower towards the end of the first row. And at the end of the second row, the engraver apparently ran out of space before finishing his word, so he etched a letter below the row.
The quality of its craftsmanship aside, as [Vainstub and his colleagues wrote], the comb’s words “for the first time provide us with a complete reliable sentence in a Canaanite dialect, written in the Canaanite script.” Even more intriguingly, it points to a much more widespread literacy in the pre-biblical 17th-century Canaan than previously thought. If words are etched on an everyday item — albeit from imported, expensive elephant tusk—what else was being written on?
Read more on Times of Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/ivory-lice-comb-a-dating-head-scratcher-may-hold-earliest-canaanite-sentence/