What the Tamils wrote in ancient Egypt

The town of Pompeii in southern Italy, consumed by a volcanic eruption in 79 CE, is a perfectly preserved snapshot of ancient Roman society in a single, tragic moment. It’s a drearily familiar setting for British schoolchildren whose Latin lessons were framed around the imagined lives of its inhabitants: The sentence, “Caecilius in horto est (Caecilius is in the garden)”, has been seared into the minds of generations. What they don’t tell the children about, and what cannot be printed in this paper, are the sexually explicit Roman graffiti found in Pompeii. To be sure, that’s only part of it — the graffiti span many aspects of life, from the lewd to the humdrum to the poetic. The most innocuous, but also the most universal, are perhaps the simple statements of presence: “Gaius was here.” It’s an ancient pastime that’s still going strong today, whether in monuments or public toilets.

A recent discovery shows that the ancient Tamils were not to be left out of the game: The words “Kopan varata kantan (Kopan came and saw)” were inscribed in a tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, where pharaohs like Tutankhamun were buried. It’s one of a number of Tamil Brahmi graffiti found at the site; among others, Cikai Korran seems to have inscribed his name or pseudonym at least eight times across five tombs. These visitors were following an existing practice of leaving their names at the site. They likely visited between the first and third centuries CE, when Egypt’s already ancient sites were a popular destination for Roman tourists.

The discovery of 20 such Tamil Brahmi inscriptions, and 10 in Sanskrit and Prakrit, is an exciting one, offering clues about trade, travel and language. It also makes one wonder — perhaps even humanity’s most ancient cave paintings were simply a statement: “I was here”.