Roughly 2,000 years ago, one visitor to Egypt’s Valley of the Kings graffitied his name — Cikai Korran — eight times in Old Tamil, an Indian language. The prolific tagger joined several others in leaving dozens of inscriptions in ancient Indian languages on the Egyptian tombs, scholars reported at a recent academic conference.
The new discoveries add to growing evidence for the presence of people from South Asia in ancient Egypt.
New inscriptions
While early Egyptologists had noticed these inscriptions, and in some cases recorded them, they did not know which language they were and were unable to translate them, according to the researchers.
As part of a new investigation, the scholars dated the Indian inscriptions to between the first and third century A.D., when Egypt was a province of the Roman Empire and the Valley of the Kings “was a tourist destination, like today,” Ingo Strauch, a professor in the Department of Slavic and South Asian Studies at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland who helped identify many of the texts, said during the presentation he gave at the conference.
Visitors to the Valley of the Kings would write or inscribe texts on the walls of the tombs, often writing their name and sometimes more information on who they were. The visitors who came from India were no exception.
One of the Sanskrit texts was written by a man named Indranandin, who claimed that he was a “messenger of King Kshaharata.” In an email to Live Science, Strauch noted that the Kshaharata dynasty ruled part of India during the first century A.D. and it’s not clear which specific King Kshaharata the messenger served. Since Egypt was ruled by the Roman Empire, Indranandin may have traveled through the Valley of the Kings on his way to Rome.
“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 said. “Whether he later travelled on to Rome, however, is unknown.”
One prolific graffiti artist was a man named Cikai Korran, who wrote eight inscriptions in five different tombs. The Tamil inscriptions translate to “Cikai Korran came here and saw,” the scholars wrote in the conference proceedings.
Charlotte Schmid, a researcher at the French School of the Far East who also identified many of the texts, said in a talk at the conference that Korran tended to write his inscriptions high up. In the tomb of Ramesses IX (who reigned circa 1126 to 1108 B.C), Korran wrote his inscription 16 to 20 feet (5 to 6 meters) above the tomb entrance. Schmid said that it’s unclear how he got up so high.
In a tomb that belonged to two New Kingdom pharaohs named Tausert and Setnakhte, scholars found that Korran also left his signature by the tomb entrance. This is the only graffiti found on this tomb, which suggests that, at the time Korran was in Egypt, the interior of the tomb was closed off. Still, he was able to find the entrance and leave his inscription on it.
It’s not clear who Korran was. The language he wrote in suggests that he was from southern India, but little else can be known for sure. Schmid noted that Korran could have been a chief, a mercenary or a merchant, among other possibilities.
Why Korran wrote his name so frequently and tried to write it as high as he did is also unclear. “It’s weird, to be frank,” Schmid said in the conference presentation.
Scholars react
These “new discoveries by Strauch and Schmid, alongside both old and more recent findings from the Roman Red Sea ports of Myos Hormos and Berenike, are exactly the kind of evidence of visiting Tamil and Western Indian merchants that we would hope to find — but have never previously been able to document on this scale,” Kasper Grønlund Evers, an independent scholar who has studied ancient long distance trade but was not involved in the current research, told Live Science in an email.
These newly found texts “prove not just the mere presence of Indians in Egypt, but also their active interest in the culture of the land,” Alexandra von Lieven, an Egyptology professor at the University of Münster who was not involved in the research, told Live Science in an email. Further research may lead to more Indian language inscriptions being found at other sites in Egypt, such as temples, von Lieven said.
