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.
