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.
Roughly 30 inscriptions written in three Indian languages were found in six different tombs in the Valley of the Kings, where Egyptian pharaohs and powerful nobles were buried for centuries. Half of the inscriptions were written in Old Tamil, and Cikai Korran was responsible for many of those, researchers wrote in a paper published in a book called “Tamil Epigraphy: A four-day international conference 11-14 February 2026, Proceedings Volume 1” (Government of Tamil Nadu, 2026). The researchers presented their findings at a February conference in Chennai, India.
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.
Source: https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/ancient-egyptians/cikai-korran-came-here-and-saw-visitors-from-india-graffitied-dozens-of-egyptian-tombs-2-000-years-ago