A 66-metre mural depicting the pharaoh Tutankhamun and Queen Nefertiti with dark skin was painted over in Cairo's Tahrir Square this week after a backlash over the figures' appearance — and it was removed just hours before the arrival of Chinese President Xi Jinping on a state visit, in a controversy reported internationally on 2 October. The mural was one of 40 commissioned to smarten up the capital for the presidential visit, painted by the volunteer youth group Rasmet Basma with the help of AI technology. But the dark-skinned depiction of the two ancient Egyptian icons ignited a heated debate on social media, with some Egyptians reading the imagery as a revival of Afrocentric claims about the pharaohs' origins. Ahmed Moussa, the 22-year-old founder of Rasmet Basma, said the Cairo governorate — which had initially approved the design — asked for the work to be painted over, and admitted the team had made an oversight in not consulting archaeology and art specialists. Former antiquities minister Zahi Hawass criticised the mural's creation without expert oversight, arguing that claims linking ancient Egyptian civilisation to sub-Saharan Africa are unfounded. He pointed to late-period temple carvings showing Egyptian kings alongside captives from Africa, Libya, Syria and Palestine, with the kings themselves not depicted as dark-skinned. The episode is the latest in a long-running series of disputes over how ancient Egyptians should be represented — from debates over a 2023 Netflix documentary to earlier arguments about reconstructions of Nefertiti herself. For Egypt, the Tahrir Square affair captures a familiar tension: a state keen to beautify its public spaces with pharaonic imagery, and a public quick to police how that imagery reflects on national identity. The mural lasted only briefly, but the argument over who the ancient Egyptians were — and what they should look like — rolls on.