I’ve never quite understood why tourists can’t help but write things like, “Gayoung was here.” But archaeological records suggest that even tourists 2,000 years ago couldn’t help but resist the urge to, well, effectively vandalize something as grand as Egypt’s Valley of Kings.
The offender’s name was Cikai Korran. Roughly 2,000 years ago, this jolly tourist reportedly left dozens of inscriptions across several Egyptian tombs, eight of which included his name. The inscriptions were in Old Tamil, an Indian language. Other than perhaps hinting at the longevity of annoying tourist behavior, the findings further expand our knowledge of ancient Indo-Egyptian connections.
The researchers presented these findings at a recent conference held in Chennai, India. A video of the presentation is available on YouTube (the presentation starts at 1:22:28).
The tourists can’t help it
To be clear, the Egyptian tombs long suffered from “vandals,” Ingo Strauch, an expert in South Asian studies at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, explained in the presentation. In 1926, French scholar Jules Baillet cataloged more than 2,000 pieces of graffiti scribbled across Egyptian tombs—mainly in Greek and Latin, suggesting the tombs were popular tourist destinations in the Roman Empire.
“When I visited the pharaonic tombs as a tourist in January 2024, I noticed that some of the graffiti looked different from the others and seemed to show similarities with Indian scripts,” Strauch told Gizmodo in an email. “Back home, I looked again at my photographs and began to suspect that the inscription might be in Tamil.”
Out of curiosity, Strauch sent the photographs to his colleague Charlotte Schmid, who confirmed that the scribbles seemed to be in Tamil, specifically “Cikai Korran came here and saw.” When Strauch and Schmid, a scholar at the French School of the Far East, returned to Baillet’s texts, they found that he, too, had found inscriptions written in an unidentified Asian language.
Cikai Korran, we see you
“Okay, if [Baillet] found one inscription, maybe he found more,” Strauch recalled during the presentation. With that knowledge, the pair kicked off an entirely new investigation on the graffiti. As a result, the team identified previously unidentified inscriptions that may be written in Sanskrit and Tamil-Brahmi, an ancient version of modern Tamil.
Another inscription, also in Old Tamil, left by Cikai Korran. © Ingo StrauchFascinatingly, “Cikai Korran” liked to leave his inscriptions fairly high up in the cave, Schmid explained during the presentation. For example, one of his markings in the tomb of Ramesses IX was written about 16 to 20 feet (5 to 6 meters) above the entrance.
Overall, the graffiti’s purpose seems to be to “show everybody that Cikai Korran came here—he wanted to be sure that everybody would see him,” Schmid said. “It’s, uh, weird, to be frank.”
“This South Indian visitor was apparently extremely excited about his visit and decided to leave his name in nearly every tomb that was accessible at the time,” Strauch added in his comment to Gizmodo. “It seems likely that he deliberately chose prominent places, often high above other graffiti, where his inscription would remain visible and untouched by later visitors.”
A longtime connection
Importantly, the inscriptions speak to a nuanced history of Indo-Egyptian connections that may have been overlooked by academia. For example, “until this discovery we never had any solid proof of visitors from India to the Nile Valley in this early period,” Steve Harvey, an Egyptologist at Stony Brook University, told The Art Newspaper.
The findings also “prove not just the mere presence of Indians in Egypt, but also their active interest in the culture of the land,” added Alexandra von Lieven, an Egyptologist at the University of Münster in Germany who was not involved in the research, to Live Science.
What’s more, Schmid explained in the presentation that some of the inscriptions referred to other graffiti at the tombs, written in Greek. That suggests these Indian tourists could read and understand the other inscriptions and that they “perceived themselves as belonging to a shared cultural sphere,” Strauch told Gizmodo.
To Cikai Korran, the vandalism might really have been a way to exercise his ego. But these scribbles lasted long enough for those years later to recognize his presence and derive some archaeological value from them. So good for him, I suppose?
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