Lice and Letters: The World’s Oldest Sentence Will Surprise You

The World’s First Written Sentence Was About… Lice?
Fun Trivia You Didn’t Know You Needed

When someone says “ancient writing,” most of us imagine epic poems, royal decrees, or some solemn clay tablet proclaiming a king’s glory. But what if the first thing humans ever bothered to write down wasn’t a grand myth or commandment… but a gripe about lice?

Believe it or not, the earliest known full sentence ever discovered was scratched into an ivory comb over 3,700 years ago in ancient Canaan. The sentence reads:

“May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.”

Now, that’s poetry with a purpose.

This little nugget of trivia tickled me in the best way. It reminded me that despite the centuries between us and the ancients, people have always dealt with the same small irritations—sometimes quite literally. The comb itself was carved from elephant tusk and dates back to around 1700 BC. That’s older than Hammurabi’s Code and nearly a thousand years before the Hebrew Bible began to take shape.

And what was etched into that precious object? Not a love letter. Not a war chronicle. But an anti-lice charm. A prayer for pest control.

There’s something comforting about that. It’s a reminder that history isn’t always grand and distant. Sometimes it’s personal and itchy.

The comb was found in Lachish, a city in modern-day Israel, and the sentence is written in an early form of the Canaanite alphabet—the very alphabet that would eventually evolve into the systems used for Greek, Latin, and even our modern English letters. That’s right: this humble lice-fighting prayer is also one of the earliest examples of our written alphabet in action. One of humanity’s first forays into the written word wasn’t a treaty or a trade ledger. It was a desperate plea for a good comb.

This puts a whole new spin on the phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword.” Sometimes, it’s mightier than the lice.

The best part? When researchers examined the comb under a microscope, they found traces of head lice. So yes—this wasn’t just symbolic. It was a working tool of pest warfare.

It’s trivia like this that keeps me hooked on history—not the kings and battles, but the tiny human moments preserved in objects like a lice comb. We read the words of some long-forgotten person who simply wanted a better day, a clean beard, and a few less itches. That’s what gets me. History, at its best, lets us eavesdrop across the ages.

Think about it: someone, thousands of years ago, cared enough about the daily nuisance of lice to not only make a tool to fight them—but to write a message for extra insurance. A little magic. A little wishful thinking. Something we still do today, whether we knock on wood, avoid walking under ladders, or label our shampoo bottles with hopeful phrases like “strengthening,” “volumizing,” or “lice-free.”

The writing on the comb is also a reminder that ancient people were practical. We sometimes imagine their writings as sacred, lofty, or mysterious. But often, it was ordinary. Practical. Earthy. They carved their thoughts onto tools, scratched names into storage jars, and left graffiti on walls. Just like we do now.

If you ever feel like your daily life is too mundane to be meaningful—remember this comb. What feels small and ordinary today may be the thing future archaeologists use to understand how we lived. Someday, someone might study your shopping list or your fridge magnets and piece together what mattered to us.

So yes, the world’s oldest complete sentence is about lice. And somehow, that feels perfect.

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