An ancient traveler from India inscribed his name across five ancient tombs in Egypt's Valley of the Kings 2,000 years ago

2,000 years ago, a man called Cikai Korran did what is arguably the most dedicated tourist flex in human history. He traveled thousands of miles from probably from the Tamil-speaking India to Egypt and wrote his name in not one, not two, but five of the ancient tombs in the Valley of the Kings, eight times in total. Now researchers have confirmed he was just one of dozens of Indian visitors to Egypt’s most sacred burial sites during the first through third centuries CE, leaving behind nearly 30 inscriptions in Indian languages and scripts, including Old Tamil, Sanskrit, Prakrit and Gandhari-Kharosthi.

This discovery is quietly changing what we know about the ancient world's version of globalization.

The find that almost went unrecognized
The story of the discovery of these inscriptions is almost as interesting as the inscriptions themselves. In January of 2024, Ingo Strauch, a professor at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, noticed unfamiliar markings while visiting the Valley of the Kings. Some markings on the tomb walls caught his eye that didn't seem to be the Greek or Latin graffiti scholars had cataloged for almost a century. He took pictures, went home and began to study them.


More than 2,000 inscriptions in Greek and Latin had been cataloged since French scholar Jules Baillet documented them in 1926, but their South Asian language context had not been recognized. Charlotte Schmid of the French School of Asian Studies in Paris, to whom Strauch sent the images, confirmed they were looking at Old Tamil. Together they recorded nearly 30 inscriptions across six tombs, written in Tamil, Sanskrit, Prakrit and Gandhari-Kharosthi. Their findings were presented in February 2026 at the International Conference on Tamil Epigraphy conducted in Chennai.

Cikai Korran: the most enthusiastic tourist of ancient history
Of all the Indian travelers who left their mark, Korran is the most outstanding. He left eight inscriptions on five different tombs, and he appears to have chosen conspicuous, inaccessible locations, often high above other graffiti, to ensure that his name would remain visible and untouched by subsequent visitors. One of his inscriptions inside the tomb of Ramses IX is about 16 to 20 feet above the entrance. No one’s quite sure how he got up there, which Schmid called “weird, to be frank,” in the conference presentation.

Korran also made his mark on the entrance of the tombs of pharaohs Tausert and Setnakhte and, interestingly, his was the only graffiti found there, suggesting the tomb might still have been sealed when he visited.

His inscriptions said only “Cikai Korran came here and saw,” the same sort of thing you find in Greek tourist graffiti in the same tombs. Researchers are not oblivious to that parallel. It suggests that Korran was not just a passerby, but culturally involved enough to follow the local custom of marking a visit.

There is another Sanskrit inscription, this one belonging to a man named Indranandin. He described himself as a messenger of a king, Kshaharata, a dynasty that ruled parts of western India in the first century CE. Researchers think Indranandin may have sailed to Berenike, on Egypt’s eastern coast, then gone inland to the Valley of the Kings, and perhaps to Rome.

Not just tourists, they were culturally fluent
One of the most interesting findings from the research is that some of these inscriptions seem to be in direct conversation with one another. In one tomb, Indian travelers explicitly refer, in Sanskrit and Tamil, to an inscription in nearby Greek, suggesting knowledge of Greek (and active engagement with it). Schmid pointed out that they were clearly conscious of a common cultural background and wanted to express this inside the tombs, showing literacy in several languages, including the Greek that dominated the walls of the tomb.

This level of multilingual awareness would indicate travelers who were deeply enmeshed in the cosmopolitan world of Roman Egypt, not just passing merchants having a quick look around.

Ancient India and Egypt were more connected than history books suggest
When you consider the trading world these travelers navigated, this discovery makes much more sense. Egypt and India had been well connected by sea in Roman times, with Red Sea ports serving as the ancient equivalent of international transit hubs. Before the Valley of the Kings find, Indian inscriptions had been discovered at Berenike, a major Red Sea port, and at Socotra, an island off the coast of Yemen, indicating the extensive geographical range of Indian travelers in the region.

A study in the Journal of Roman Studies shows that archaeological evidence from Berenike, such as the large-scale consumption of rice, implies that there was probably a resident or seasonally resident South Asian population at the port, and that a broader range of people were involved in long-distance trade than Roman-era texts alone would indicate. This is complemented by research by archaeologist Roberta Tomber in Antiquity, which found that excavations at Berenike had yielded physical archaeological evidence of Indo-Roman trade in the form of ceramics, glass beads, textiles and botanical remains, along with an early Tamil-Brahmi graffito, confirming the port as a major meeting-point between the Mediterranean and Indian worlds.

And a peer-reviewed article published in the Journal of Global History has documented the long history of Indian traders passing through Egyptian ports, but the Valley of the Kings inscriptions are among the clearest evidence that these travelers traveled far into Egypt’s interior, well beyond the coastline.

Why no one noticed for a century
In fact, the inscriptions had been seen before, recorded by early Egyptologists who were unable to recognize the language. The Tamil graffiti were overlooked simply because no one with enough knowledge of Indian languages had looked at them in detail, explained Egyptologist Steve Harvey. Greek and Aramaic graffiti had been studied for many years, but scholars who worked on South Asian languages rarely worked on Egyptian tomb inscriptions.

Strauch told the Times of India simply: “We knew that traders from Tamil Nadu visited Egypt through other inscriptions found in the ancient port cities. 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.”

What it all means
The broader significance was summed up by Strauch: “These new inscriptions show the integration of people of Indian origin from all parts of the subcontinent into the society of Roman Egypt. This discovery makes it likely that additional Indian inscriptions or other Indian artifacts may yet be found in Egypt.”

Alexandra von Lieven, professor of Egyptology at the University of Munster, said the texts showed not only that Indians were in Egypt but also that they were actively interested in the culture of the land, suggesting that further research may reveal more Indian-language inscriptions at temples and other sites throughout Egypt.

If you thought the ancient world was a series of isolated civilizations that rarely met, think again. Cikai Korran’s eight signatures across five pharaoh tombs say otherwise.