Ancient Graffiti in Giza and Early Visitors

Ancient graffiti in Giza is a topic that turns a common assumption on its head: this place has not been a tourist destination only since modern times, but for at least three thousand years.

This conclusion follows from a number you need to grasp. The pyramids were built around 2,560 BC. When the first visitors we would recognize as such—people who were not part of the cult and did not work there—arrived, the structures were already about a thousand years old. More time elapsed between the construction and the first recorded tourism than between Charlemagne and us.

These visitors left traces. Some wrote their names on a wall, some erected a stele, some wrote a book. For research, these casual traces are particularly valuable because they show how the site was perceived at different times.

Why this is more than a curiosity becomes clear with a thought on scope. The structures have stood for about four and a half thousand years. For at most the first five hundred years, they functioned as an active cult site. For the vast majority of their existence, therefore, they were what they are today: ancient structures that people come to see. Tourism is not a late secondary use of this place, but its longest state of being.

This page goes through the layers, from oldest to newest. It explicitly distinguishes between what is documented for Giza specifically and what applies generally to Egyptian monuments, because both are often mixed together in this field.

When Egyptians Became Visitors Themselves

The first layer of visitors is the most surprising because it comes from Egypt itself.

In the New Kingdom, roughly a thousand years after construction, the plateau was no longer a construction site but a sightseeing attraction. The complexes were partly buried in sand, the cult around the kings of the Fourth Dynasty long extinguished, and the Sphinx protruded from the sand only by its head. For the people of that time, the structures were as old and as mysterious as a Roman ruin is to us.

Exactly in this situation, a new form of veneration arose. The Sphinx was cleared, received a cult as a deity, and became the target of visits that can be described without exaggeration as both a pilgrimage and an excursion. The most famous testimony to this is a stele between the paws, in which a king records his own visit; it has its own page.

This phase is documented not only by structures but also by the way the site was used at the time. New small shrines were built among the ancient complexes, and the official overview of the site lists the necropolis not as a completed building state of the Old Kingdom, but as a place with a long history of usage. What we see today is thus never just the Fourth Dynasty, but an overlay.

Two things are noteworthy for our topic. First: The idea of leaving an inscription on an ancient structure is not disrespectful here, but the usual way to document a visit. Second: Interpretation was uncertain even then. People of the New Kingdom no longer knew exactly who had built the pyramids and sometimes attributed them to other rulers. Thus, the site was already an object of speculation in antiquity.

Greeks and Romans as Travelers

The second layer is Greek and Roman influenced, and here tourism begins in the modern sense.

The oldest surviving account by an outside visitor dates from the fifth century BC, written by a Greek author who traveled Egypt and described in detail what he was told about the pyramids. His text remains the most cited ancient source for this site, and it serves as a cautionary tale: The numbers he cites, such as the number of workers and the construction time, are now considered unreliable because he did not report from personal observation but relayed what local guides told him. Thus, the first recorded travelogue about Giza is based on information from tour guides, and part of it was already embellished back then.

From the same era and subsequent centuries, numerous inscriptions by travelers exist at Egyptian monuments: names, origins, professions, often no more than a note that someone was there and marveled. These testimonies are fruitful for research because they show who was traveling and what was considered worth seeing. They also document something you cannot see from an inscription alone: that there was infrastructure. Anyone traveling from the Mediterranean region to the Nile and leaving their name at a monument needed ships, accommodations, route descriptions, and people to show them the way and tell stories. Tourism at this site is thus not only old; it was organized early on.

Accuracy is required at this point. That such inscriptions exist in large numbers in Egypt is well documented. However, a citable proof of a documented collection of Greek or Latin visitor inscriptions specifically on the structures of Giza could not be found in this research. We therefore present this as a general picture of the time rather than a statement about this specific site. Those who want more detail will find the Giza Archive of Harvard University with far and away the largest digital collection of excavation records for this site, including diaries and photographs.

The Arabic Inscription in the Second Pyramid

The third layer is the most interesting because it corrects a common narrative.

In the burial chamber of the second pyramid stands Arabic script documenting a visit around the year 1200. When an Italian scholar-traveler entered the same chamber in 1818 and left his name and date in black paint, he believed himself to be the first person in modern times at this site. He was roughly six hundred years too late, and the proof stood just a few meters next to his own signature.

His belief that he was the first is more understandable than it sounds. He arrived with an education that allowed him to read languages and scripts of Europe, and the Arabic inscription was meaningless to him. The chamber was empty, the sarcophagus lidless, and everything suggested that no one had been there for a long time. Errors in the history of science arise precisely like this: not from dishonesty, but from overlooking testimonies one cannot read.

This juxtaposition is more than an anecdote. It shows that the European narrative of the rediscovery of Egypt is a matter of perspective. Nothing was discovered that was not already known; what changed was who wrote about it and in which language.

Noteworthy as well is how differently both inscriptions are read today. The medieval one is regarded as a source. The one from 1818 is also regarded as a source, but is simultaneously perceived as damage because it was applied with paint and because its author knew he was writing on a monument. The boundary between testimony and damage thus runs not along age, but along intent and method.

A third case belongs here because it sharpens the boundary further. Dating from the opening of the largest pyramid in the nineteenth century, an inscription in one of the chambers above the burial chamber has had its authenticity disputed for decades. The debate surrounding it is treated in detail on another page of this offering and does not belong here. However, it shows what is at stake: Once an inscription serves as evidence for something, the question of who placed it and when becomes the central issue. With a visitor inscription, this is irrelevant; with a construction inscription, it determines the attribution of an entire structure.

Today, the matter is clear. The necropolis has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 1979, and interventions on the substance are prohibited. Anyone writing their name on a block today produces not a source for future research, but damage that must be removed and is criminally prosecuted. That the same act is a document in one epoch and a crime in another is one of the more uncomfortable insights of this topic.