A Traveler From India Graffitied His Name on Five Ancient Tombs in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings 2,000-Years-Ago
Researchers have discovered 30 inscriptions written in Indian languages, which provide new evidence that visitors from India spent time in Egypt between the first and third centuries C.E.
Some 2,000 years ago, a man from India named Cikai Korran scratched his name in several places inside rocky tombs in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, the sacred burial site of pharaohs and elites, including Tutankhamun.
Korran’s graffiti, written in the Old Tamil language, appears eight times across five tombs. It’s surrounded by similar etchings made by several others, all of which date to between the first and third centuries C.E. Altogether, these nearly 30 inscriptions—written in four Indian languages and found inside six tombs—provide new evidence that people from South Asia visited ancient Egypt.
“We knew that traders from Tamil Nadu visited Egypt through other inscriptions found in the ancient port cities,” Ingo Strauch, a scholar at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, tells the Times of India’s A. Ragu Raman. “This shows that they did not only come with ships and return, but they also stayed here for a longer period of time. They took time even to visit sites that are far away.”
Twenty of the inscriptions, including this one, were written in Tamil.
Strauch and Charlotte Schmid, a scholar at the French School of Asian Studies, presented these findings last month at an academic conference in India. Their discovery adds to previous scholarship on Indian inscriptions found at Berenike, an ancient Red Sea port, and Socotra, an island off the coast of Yemen.
The discovery was rather serendipitous. Strauch was visiting the Valley of the Kings, which opened to tourists more than a century ago, and was surprised when he recognized Indian languages among the other well-documented graffiti in languages like Greek.
Assuming that somebody else had already noticed the text, he took photographs of the lines that piqued his curiosity. After he returned home, he realized he may have stumbled upon something new. Twenty of the 30 inscriptions are in Tamil, while the others are in languages such as Sanskrit, Prakrit and Gandhari-Kharoshi, according to the Times of India.
A 2,000-year-old inscription by Cikai Korran
“It seems that the reason that the Tamil graffiti in tombs in the Valley of the Kings went unrecognized is essentially that no one with adequate knowledge noticed them before,” Steve Harvey, an Egyptologist who was not involved in the research, tells the Art Newspaper’s Hadani Ditmars. “Very few scholars who focus on languages of India tend to study graffiti in Egypt—whereas Greek and Aramaic graffiti have been recognized and studied for a very long time.”
The writings of Korran stood out to the researchers not only because there were so many, but because they were also written in hard-to-reach places. In one instance, inside the tomb of Ramses IX, Korran’s inscription is written 16 to 20 feet above the tomb’s entrance.
“It’s weird, to be frank,” Schmid said during the presentation.
The name “Indranandin” also appeared in Sanskrit among the graffiti. According to the researchers, Indranandin described himself as a messenger of King Kshaharata, referencing a dynasty that ruled over western India during the first century C.E.
“It is possible that Indranandin arrived by ship at Berenike [on the east coast of Egypt], perhaps together with other Indians, and from there continued inland to the Valley of the Kings,” Strauch tells Live Science’s Owen Jarus. Strauch wonders whether he traveled to Egypt on his way to Rome, which controlled Egypt at the time.
The researchers were particularly struck by how some graffiti messages appear to be in dialogue with each other. Inside one tomb, writings in Sanskrit and Tamil reference another inscription written in Greek, suggesting some level of cross-cultural engagement.
“These new inscriptions show the integration of people of Indian origin from all parts of the subcontinent into the society of Roman Egypt,” Strauch tells the Art Newspaper. “This discovery makes it likely that additional Indian inscriptions or other Indian artifacts may yet be found in Egypt.”
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