[Bonetools] FW: [agade] NEWS: Bronze Age Ivory lice comb inscription

[Steve Ashby]

Amazing stuff, Etan!

Steve


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‪On Wed, 9 Nov 2022 at 17:37, ‫איתן איילון‬‎ <etana at eretzmuseum.org.il>
wrote:‬

> Published today.
> Blessings,
> Etan Ayalon
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Agade at listserv.unc.edu <Agade at listserv.unc.edu>
> Sent: Wednesday, November 9, 2022 6:18 PM
> To: The Agade mailing list‏ <agade at listserv.unc.edu>
> Subject: [agade] NEWS: Bronze Age Ivory lice comb inscription
>
> From <
> https://www.timesofisrael.com/ivory-lice-comb-a-dating-head-scratcher-may-hold-earliest-canaanite-sentence/
> >:
> [Go there for pix]
> ========================
>
> Ivory lice comb – a dating head-scratcher – may hold earliest Canaanite
> sentence
>
> With a paucity of contemporary Bronze Age examples for comparison,
> scholars believe relatable 7-word inscription is first recorded complete
> proto-Canaanite sentence in Holy Land By AMANDA BORSCHEL-DAN
>
> The first — and only — early Canaanite sentence was recently deciphered on
> a Middle Bronze Age ivory lice comb found during a 2016 excavation at
> Lachish in central Israel. According to epigrapher Dr.
> Daniel Vainstub, the inscription dates to circa 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, the
> Argentine-born Vainstub reminded The Times of Israel, is after all the
> third of the ten plagues of Egypt.
>
> According to Vainstub, “the comb’s inscription is written in the style
> that characterized the very earliest stage of the alphabet’s development.”
> Therefore, since the earliest Canaanite inscriptions in Sinai are dated to
> the 19th century BCE, Vainstub dates the comb to the earliest settlement at
> Lachish — the 17th century BCE.
>
> The inscription contains 17 tiny, 1-to-3 mm 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 the article states, the comb’s
> words “for the first time provide us with a complete reliable sentence in a
> Canaanite dialect, written in the Canaanite script.”
>
> Ben Gurion University’s Vainstub is the lead author of the article, “A
> Canaanite’s Wish to Eradicate Lice on an Inscribed Ivory Comb from
> Lachish,” published in the Hebrew University-affiliated online Jerusalem
> Journal of Archaeology.
>
> This complete — and completely relatable — sentence will cause a ripple
> effect in the study of proto-Canaanite. It could influence the way scholars
> understand its grammar, syntax and vocabulary. It may be the only preserved
> example of the now-extinct Hebrew letter “sin.” It is also likely the
> earliest record of the word “tusk” until its use in Rabbinic Hebrew two
> thousand years later.
>
> 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?
>
> The comb was unearthed at Lachish from a trash pit of jumbled periods,
> including a number of complete vessels dating to the 7th–6th centuries BCE
> and earlier artifacts. That Tel Lachish excavation, which ended in 2017,
> was conducted by a team from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
> (HU) and Southern Adventist University in the United States, under the
> direction of Professors Yosef Garfinkel, Michael Hasel and Martin Klingbeil.
>
> “The comb inscription is direct evidence for the use of the alphabet in
> daily activities some 3,700 years ago. This is a landmark in the history of
> the human ability to write,” said excavation director Garfinkel in a press
> release.
>
> But although the comb is visibly scratched — as one would expect from
> millennia of subterranean wear and tear — its inscription was initially
> overlooked and it was set aside, earmarked for inclusion in a study of
> three additional lice combs discovered at Lachish.
>
> A scientist as well as an archaeologist, Dr. Madeleine Mumcuoglu checked
> the comb for remains of lice under a Dino-Lite digital microscope and
> minute residue of head lice was found on the second tooth. She too put it
> to the side after finding no hope of harvesting ancient lice DNA.
>
> The shallow inscription was only discovered years later in 2021 when
> Mumcuoglu took out her iPhone to photograph it while finishing up her
> study. Her “better” camera had been recently stolen, she told The Times of
> Israel on Tuesday. But when she enhanced the lighting on the tiny 3.5cm x
> 2.5cm comb to get a good shot with her phone, she noted what appeared to be
> deliberate etchings of letters.
>
> She immediately sent an image to her friend and colleague Vainstub and
> asked the epigrapher, “Am I dreaming or do you see letters?”
>
> Vainstub told The Times of Israel that he quickly identified several clear
> proto-Canaanite letters and asked to examine the comb. He said he made
> relatively quick work of the inscription following the results of
> Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) in the Jerusalem labs of the
> Israel Antiquities Authority as the RTI photographs brought out the unseen
> grooves of the scribe’s etching.
>
> What was more difficult for the scholar was shoring up his conclusions
> with parallel examples from contemporary inscriptions. While some dozen
> inscriptions have been discovered at Lachish, only one — four words incised
> into a Middle Bronze-era dagger found in a tomb — is likely contemporary to
> the comb. The most comparable proto-Canaanite inscriptions hail from
> Serabiṭ el-Khadem in southern Sinai and are dated by squabbling scholars
> from anywhere from the 19th century BCE to the 13th century BCE.
>
> There are some linguistic discoveries that are found here for the first
> time in a Canaanite inscription, said Vainstub. “I discovered the letter
> ‘sin‘ — the Canaanites had a special letter for that. Here we have that
> letter.” (In modern Hebrew it is denoted by a dot on the left side of a
> letter, versus the right, “shin.”)
>
> The Canaanites’ original alphabet was 29 letters, which in time shrank to
> 22. But in the southern Arabian cultures, the full 29-letter alphabet was
> preserved until the 7th century CE. The letter “sin,” he said, was
> preserved in the southern Arabian peninsula, in today’s Yemen, through the
> ancient South Arabian alphabet, which was derived from the Canaanite one.
>
> However, linking a “lost” 17th-century BCE letter to the South Arabian
> alphabet is not without problems. The most ancient of these inscriptions
> are dated to the 11th century BCE, said Vainstub, and are very few in
> number. Many more inscriptions are found there from the 8th century BCE
> onwards, he said.
>
> Dating dilemma
> Prof. Christopher Rollston inspecting the inscribed late 9th or early 8th
> century BCE altar that was discovered in a Moabite sanctuary at the Khirbat
> Ataruz site in central Jordan in 2010. (Courtesy)
>
> The research team turned to carbon dating of the ivory for an outside
> indication of the age of the comb. Twice, samples failed to register and so
> the epigraphy — the shapes of the letters — is the sole basis for its
> dating.
>
> The Times of Israel approached three world-renown epigrapher scholars who
> unanimously supported Vainstub’s methodology and scholarship.
>
> “I am certain that there is some room for debating the precise date for
> this new comb inscription from Lachish, but I would emphasize that this
> inscription is certainly written in the Canaanite script (i.e., Early
> Alphabetic script) and that it dates to the earlier period of this script.
> In other words, this is a very early alphabetic inscription,” said Prof.
> Christopher A. Rollston of George Washington University, who was also a
> peer reviewer of the article.
>
> Rollston added: “This Bronze Age inscribed comb joins a chorus of
> important inscriptions from this crucial ancient site, inscriptions dating
> to the Bronze and Iron Ages… and these inscriptions from the Bronze and
> Iron Ages are written in a variety of different languages and scripts.
> Literarily, this is quite a site!”
>
> French polymath independent epigrapher and historian Dr. Michael Langlois
> called the new inscription “a missing link in the history of the alphabet.”
> He added, “It is all the more frustrating that it cannot be precisely
> dated.”
>
> Langlois elaborated, giving some potential scenarios for its find spot at
> Lachish.
>
> “Contrary to what we would expect from the archaeological context in which
> it was found, the inscription does not use the old Hebrew script (also
> called Palaeo-Hebrew), which was the standard script in the Kingdom of
> Judah,” he said. “Yet the comb was found in a stratigraphical context that
> corresponds to the Kingdom of Judah.
> There is a sort of anachronism: to our knowledge, the script featured on
> the comb was no longer in use at the time.
>
> “I can think of several explanations: (1) contrary to our current working
> hypothesis, this script was still in use half a millennium later than we
> thought, and cohabited with the old Hebrew script; (2) in the late Kingdom
> of Judah, someone decided, for whatever reason, to resuscitate or imitate
> this old script even though it was no longer in use for centuries; (3) the
> comb is actually much older and was kept for centuries. This is the most
> probable hypothesis: three other combs were found in Lachish, and all date
> to the second millennium BCE, which is precisely when the script was in
> use,” Langlois told The Times of Israel.
>
> Israeli epigrapher, Dr. Haggai Misgav, a lecturer at the Hebrew
> University, told The Times of Israel that inscriptions in this script are
> difficult to decipher because there is relatively little information
> available about them, especially in such an early period when there is
> great variability in the scribes.
>
> “Daniel Vainstub’s work is thorough and worthy of praise and has yielded
> an interesting reading… I imagine there will be those who disagree with the
> identification of certain letters (but not the fact that there are
> letters). I don’t have a better reading to offer,”
> Misgav wrote in an email.
>
> The third plague
> The inscription is a plea, a wish, or a desire that the small comb be
> successful in getting rid of the irritating lice. What it is not,
> interestingly, is a prayer, said Vainstub, although its language echoes
> that of the biblical Priestly Blessing in structure.
>
> “The ancient world is a believing world, atheism did not exist and people
> would use their deities whenever possible, but not here. This is an
> entirely secular inscription. There’s no god here. It’s not a prayer,” said
> Vainstub.
>
> “Then, and today, for most of our lives we don’t busy ourselves with
> ideology, but with day-to-day matters, with human existence, and part of
> the human experience is fighting lice, which was a real plague — the third
> plague,” laughed Vainstub.
>
> Mumcuoglu asserted that the comb definitely belonged to an important man.
> Regarding its very small size, she wondered out loud, “I was thinking that
> even until today, people are ashamed of having lice, which is not
> reasonable. No one should be ashamed of having lice. We know today that
> lice prefer clean hair — it is not a sign of poor hygiene, on the contrary.
> But maybe back then they were ashamed of being infected and if the headlice
> were pestering their beard, they could take the [tiny] comb out in secret
> and then hide it in a pocket.”
>
> Rollston was likewise sympathetic to the ancient owner’s plight. “The fact
> that this inscription is about ordinary life is especially fascinating.
> Throughout human history, lice have been a perennial problem. And this
> inscription nicely reveals that even ‘the rich and famous’ in ancient times
> (or modern times!) are not exempt from such problems. We can only hope that
> this inscribed comb was useful in doing that which it says it was supposed
> to do: root out some of these pesky insects,” he wrote.
>
> Langlois, who is easily identified at crowded academic conferences by his
> flowing locks, echoed his peers’ sentiments and took a slightly more
> philosophical view: “I find it quite amusing that such an important
> inscription… is actually about a very down-to-earth issue which we still
> face today: getting rid of lice! Even though it is less of a problem today,
> all of us parents know what a nightmare it can be.
>
> “As a historian, I feel privileged to study ancient people’s daily life.
> History helps us know who we are as human beings, throughout time and
> space. And by knowing who we are as human beings, our variables and
> constants, we can plot our trajectory and make better decisions for our
> future,” wrote Langlois.
>
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