About 2,000 years ago, a visitor to Egypt’s Valley of the Kings graffitied his name—Cikai Korran—eight times in ancient Tamil, an Indian language. The prolific tagger joined several others in leaving dozens of inscriptions in ancient Indian languages on the Egyptian tombs, researchers reported at a recent academic conference.
The new findings add mounting 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 what language they were in and were unable to translate them, according to the researchers.
As part of a new study, the scholars dated the Indian inscriptions to between the first and third centuries AD, when Egypt was a province of Roman Empire and the Valley of the Kings “was a tourist destination, like today,” Ingo Straucha professor at the Department of Slavic and South Asian Studies at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland who helped identify many of the texts, said under presentation he gave at the conference.
Visitors to the Valley of the Kings wrote or inscribed texts on the walls of the tombs, often writing their name and sometimes more information about who they were. The visitors who came from India was no exception.
One of the Sanskrit texts was written by a man named Indranandin, who claimed to be 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 AD, and it is not clear which specific king the Kshaharata 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 with other Indians, and from there proceeded inland to the Valley of the Kings,” Strauch said. “Whether he later traveled on to Rome is, however, unknown.”
A 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.
Charlotte Schmidta researcher at the French School of the Far East who also identified many of the texts said in a speech at the conference that Korran tended to write his inscriptions high up. In the tomb of Ramesses IX (reigned c. 1126 to 1108 BC), Korran wrote his inscription 16 to 20 feet (5 to 6 meters) above the tomb entrance. Schmid said it is unclear how he rose so high.
In a tomb belonging to two New Kingdom pharaohs named Tausert and Setnakhte, scholars found that Korran also left his signature at the tomb entrance. This is the only graffiti found on this tomb, suggesting that at the time Korran was in Egypt, the interior of the tomb was closed. Nevertheless, he managed to find the entrance and leave his inscription on it.
It is not clear who Korran was. The language he wrote in suggests that he was from South India, but little else can be known for sure. Schmid noted that Korran could have been a commander, a mercenary, or a merchant, among other possibilities.
Why Korran wrote his name so often and tried to write it as loudly as he did is also unclear. “It’s weird, to be honest,” Schmid said in the conference presentation.
Scientists are responding
These “new finds by Strauch and Schmid, along with both ancient and recent finds from the Roman Red Sea ports of Myos Hormos and Berenike, are exactly the kind of evidence of visiting Tamil and West Indian merchants that we hope to find – but have never before been able to document on this scale,” Kasper Grønlund Evers, an independent researcher who has studied ancient long-distance trade but was not involved in the current research told LiveScience in an email.
These newly discovered texts “prove not only the mere presence of Indians in Egypt, but also their active interest in the country’s culture,” Alexandra von Lievenan Egyptology professor at the University of Münster who was not involved in the research told LiveScience in an email. Further research could lead to more Indian language inscriptions being found in other places in Egypt, such as temples, von Lieven said.
