By: Jehiely Balabarca
The artifact is small, delicate and easy to overlook. Yet, the thin, jagged ivory comb—about the size of a U.S. postage stamp—holds an inscription that is the oldest sentence in an alphabetic script.
Discovered in 2016 at the ancient Canaanite city of Lachish, the 3,700-year-old comb features words etched faintly onto its surface. They simply state: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.”
Now, the artifact is temporarily located in a display case on the first floor of Southern Adventist University’s Lynn H. Wood Archaeological Museum. It arrived in January, hand-carried by an Israeli antiquities official.
On Jan. 27, Southern hosted a symposium featuring international experts, including Chris Rollston, a leading scholar in ancient inscriptions. Since then, the exhibit has drawn visitors from across the country.
The comb was unearthed during the Fourth Expedition to Lachish, an excavation co-directed by Southern and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. One of Southern’s own students, Katherine Hesler, was leading the team that found it.
“I had little to do with it personally other than being present at the time it was found,” recalled Edwin Reynolds, a retired professor from Southern’s School of Religion, who was also present at the excavation. “Katherine Hesler, my student at the time, was the square supervisor. She collected it, recorded it in her journal, showed it to the bio-archaeologist who identified it as ivory, bagged it, washed it and shared it with the lead archaeologists who had it sent to the lab at Hebrew University.”
Reynolds said it was inspected more closely five and half years later and subsequently found to bear the now-famous inscription.
At the time of discovery, it was just another artifact from a site filled with ancient remnants. It wasn’t until Hebrew University researcher Madeleine Mumcuoglu took a second look that the inscription was spotted.
The words represent a critical moment in the history of writing. Before the alphabet, civilizations relied on complex systems like Egyptian hieroglyphs or Mesopotamian cuneiform, both requiring hundreds of symbols. The alphabet, developed around 1800 B.C., changed everything, reducing written language to a set of simple characters that could be learned and used by more people.
“The development of writing is probably the most important invention of humankind,” said Yosef Garfinkel, one of the excavation’s co-directors, in an article published in the Chattanooga Times Free Press.
In a field where entire careers are built on a single breakthrough, the discovery is what archaeologists dream of.
“Holding the ivory comb is humbling,” Michael Hasel, co-director of the excavation and School of Religion professor at Southern said. “If we had moved just 30 centimeters to the south, we would have missed it entirely. It was God’s providence.”
The exhibit at Southern highlights not only the comb but also the broader history of Tel Lachish, a site mentioned in the Bible and once one of the most influential cities in the region. The comb will remain on display until May 2, offering a rare opportunity to see a piece of ancient history up close, a reminder that even the smallest artifacts can carry the weight of civilization’s earliest words.
