What is the world’s oldest written sentence? If you are scratching your head for the answer and then tearing your hair out, you have got it right. The honour goes to “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard”.

Archaeologists in Israel announced on Wednesday that 17 letters inscribed in early Canaanite script on an ivory comb about 3,700 years old make up the earliest known complete sentence in the oldest known alphabet.

Translated to English, the sentence has 13 words. The comb was excavated from the ancient Israeli city of Lachish. “The Canaanite alphabet is the oldest in the world. This is the first time we have a complete sentence in the local dialect of the Canaanite inhabitants of Lachish,” Madeleine Mumcuoglu, an excavation team member, told The Telegraph.

Mumcuoglu is an archaeologist at Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. The comb is 3.6cm long and2.5cm wide and has 14 teeth. The team said the central part of the comb had eroded, possibly by the pressure of fingers holding it during hair care or removal of lice. Microscopic examination of the comb revealed remains of head lice 0.5mm to 0.6mm on the second tooth.

The finding has bolstered evidence for earlier suggestions by scholars that the first alphabet had emerged somewhere in the southern Levant— or the region of present-day Lebanon, Israel and the Sinai peninsula — between 3,800and 3,500 years ago.

Some scholars had proposed that the roots of most historic and modern alphabets used in Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia lie in scripts that emerged around that period in the southern Levant.

Archaeology teams excavating the region over the past several decades have cumulatively documented dozens of Canaanite inscriptions, but all of them were composed of two or three words.

“Thus far, from the first 1,000 years of the alphabet, we’ve had only fragmented inscriptions, a word, two words, three words, a few letters,” Yosef Garfinkel, professor of archaeology at the Hebrew University and another team member, said.