It’s a global mystery, found on the walls of cities all over the world, on monuments, stones and even certain trees: tourists can’t help but engrave their names there. Safety protocols have often been put in place to combat this modern scourge. Modern? Not sure. Archaeologists have found traces of tourist vandalism on tombs in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt.
Named Cikai Korran, the man left a dozen inscriptions carved into the rock, eight of which contain his name. His tags were in old Tamil, an Indian language. These inscriptions confirm to us that tourists have always acted in this way, but they are also rich in historical lessons. They allow us to learn more about Indo-Egyptian connections of the time. The researchers presented their findings at a conference in India, available on YouTube (the presentation starts at 1h22min).
Egyptian tombs almost always suffered from vandalism in various forms, says Ingo Strauch, a Southeast Asia specialist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. A previous study in 1926 had already noted more than 2,000 inscriptions in these tombs, the majority of which in Greek and Latin, suggesting that Egypt was, under the Roman Empire, a popular tourist destination.
“While visiting the Pharaonic Tombs as a tourist in January 2024, I noticed that some of the graffiti was different from the others and seemed to have similarities to Indian writingexplained Ingo Strauch to Gizmodo by email. DWhen I got home, I looked at my photos again and began to suspect that the inscription might be in Tamil.»
Cikai Korran, the crazy graffiti artist
Curious, he sent his photos to his colleague Charlotte Schmid, who confirmed that the inscriptions were written in Tamil and said “Cikai Korran came here and saw”. By digging a little, the two researchers discovered references to inscriptions in ancient Asian languages in Baillet’s work.
“If there is one entry, there are bound to be others.», explained Ingo Strauch during his presentation. Some of their theory, Ingo Strauch and Charlotte Schmid launched a new investigation. This allowed them to identify new inscriptions, potentially written in Sanskrit and Tamil-Brahmi, the ancestor of today’s Tamil.
Cikai Korran, our main protagonist, was not content with signing the walls he passed, he also sought to leave his mark above. In the tomb of Ramesses IX, one of his marks sits six meters high. For Charlotte Schmid, it had a specific goal: “He wanted to make sure he was seen by everyone. It’s, to be honest, quite strange.” This visitor from South India, passionate about his journey, therefore marked almost every tomb accessible at the time, choosing technical locations so that his name would escape damage and survive.
These graffiti redefine our understanding of Indo-Egyptian relations. For Egyptologist Steve Harvey, it is even a revolution: “Until this discovery, we had no solid evidence of the presence of Indian visitors to the Nile Valley at such an early time.» Alexandra von Lieven, of the University of Münster in Germany, explains that these traces prove an Indian interest in Egyptian culture at the time, and not just a commercial presence.
Even more intriguing, some graffiti in Tamil respond directly to graffiti in Greek. Some Indian tourists therefore understood other languages and perhaps considered themselves part of a shared cultural sphere. If Cikai Korran surely simply wanted to inflate his ego and act smart, his vandalism has become, two thousand years later, an archaeological treasure.
