Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.
Approximately 2,000 years ago, a man named Cikai Korran traveled thousands of miles from southern India to Egypt, entered tombs of ancient pharaohs, and wrote “Cikai Korran came here and saw” on the walls at least eight times that we know of. Sometimes 20 feet up. He came, he saw, he tagged. None of them adds anything else. He saw. That was the whole update.
Tagging at its oldest and finest. (Ingo Strauch)
The inscriptions are in Old Tamil, a South Indian language, and were hiding in plain sight for about a century. French scholar Jules Baillet cataloged over 2,000 pieces of ancient graffiti in these tombs back in 1926, mostly in Greek and Latin, because the pharaohs’ final resting places had apparently become the TripAdvisor of the Roman Empire. Baillet noted some inscriptions in an unidentified Asian language but didn’t pursue it further, presumably because he had 2,000 other pieces of vandalism to process and was only one man.
Swiss scholar Ingo Strauch visited the tombs as a tourist in January 2024 and noticed that some of the graffiti might be Tamil script. He sent the images to a colleague, Charlotte Schmid, who confirmed the language and translated the text.
At a conference in Chennai, Schmid walked the audience through Cikai Korran’s placement strategy. One inscription in the tomb of Ramesses IX was positioned 16 to 20 feet above the entrance, deliberately above everyone else’s graffiti. Two thousand years later, it’s still there and still legible. Say what you will about the ethics, but the execution was flawless.
Schmid’s professional assessment of the behavior was concise. “It’s, uh, weird, to be frank,” she told the audience, with the careful composure of a scholar who has just spent months analyzing what amounts to one of the world’s oldest ‘first posts’ in a comments section.
What elevates the findings beyond ancient tourism is the evidence of cultural exchange. Some of Cikai Korran’s inscriptions appear to reference nearby Greek graffiti, suggesting he could read it and considered himself part of the same cosmopolitan world message board. Researchers also identified what may be Sanskrit and Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions from other visitors. Steve Harvey, an Egyptologist at Stony Brook University, noted that this represents the first solid evidence of Indian visitors to the Nile Valley in this period.
More tagging poetry. (Timothee Sassolas/depositphotos)
Other inscriptions at the site may be in Sanskrit and Tamil-Brahmi, suggesting Korran wasn’t the only South Asian visitor, just the loudest. The academic contribution is genuine, peer-reviewed, and historically significant. It also amounts to “guy from India really, really wanted people in Egypt to know he’d been to Egypt,” which is the kind of tension between profound and profoundly dumb that archaeology lives for.
The researchers have not yet determined Cikai Korran’s profession, social status, or exactly what he was doing 4,000 miles from home with that much time and so many walls to write on. What they can confirm is that he wanted everyone to know he’d been there. He succeeded, because 2,000 years later, a Swiss man on vacation finally noticed and told the rest of us.
He is now the subject of international academic conferences. It’s possible this is exactly what he wanted.
This story is based on fully factual news, but if we got it wrong, blame these guys, we’re just here to make it funny.
