Fark linked up news of the discovery of the oldest known Semitic text found to-date. Discovered on the sarcophagus of an Egyptian king about a century ago, the entire inscription baffled Egyptologists until, in 2002, one e-mailed it to Richard Steiner, a professor of Semitic languages at Yeshiva University in New York. He discovered the reason for the inscription's inscrutability was that it was an interpolation of both Semitic and Egyptian.

It's thought that the text, which turns out to be a magic curse meant to ward off evil spirits and snakes, is perhaps 4500 years old, making it at least a century older than any other previously found Semitic texts. This puts its creation right at the time the pyramids at Giza were being constructed.