Live Science has an article about a recent academic conference that presented research about, among other things, inscriptions left in Egyptian tombs in ancient Indian languages 2,000 years ago.
According to Live Science,
One 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 proceedings.
Charlotte Schmid, a researcher at the French School of the Far East who also identified many of the texts, said in a talk at the conference that Korran tended to write his inscriptions high up. In the tomb of Ramesses IX (who reigned circa 1126 to 1108 B.C.), Korran wrote his inscription 16 to 20 feet (5 to 6 meters) above the tomb entrance. Schmid said that it’s unclear how he got up so high.
In a tomb that belonged to two New Kingdom pharaohs named Tausert and Setnakhte, scholars found that Korran also left his signature by the tomb entrance. This is the only graffiti found on this tomb, which suggests that, at the time Korran was in Egypt, the interior of the tomb was closed off. Still, he was able to find the entrance and leave his inscription on it.
It’s not clear who Korran was. The language he wrote in suggests that he was from southern India, but little else can be known for sure. Schmid noted that Korran could have been a chief, a mercenary or a merchant, among other possibilities.
Why Korran wrote his name so frequently and tried to write it as high as he did is also unclear. “It’s weird, to be frank,” Schmid said in the conference presentation.
It’s kind of weird, to be frank, that Schmid finds it weird that our hero Cikai wrote his name so many times. As Rennie Ellis put it, the point of tagging is “the result of someone’s urge to say something–to comment, inform, entertain, persuade, offend or simply to confirm his or her own existence on earth.“
Cikai leaving his name everywhere he could is one of the most human things I can imagine wanting to do in the presence of tombs that were ancient by his time. The urge to leave something behind that says, “I, too, was here” seems obvious to me.
As for how he got so high, I wonder how taggers manage to get access to the Oceanwide Center’s floors. Sixteen to 20 feet high is nothing for a motivated tagger.
