Cairo mural of dark-skinned pharaohs painted over ahead of Xi's visit

In late August, a group of young volunteers in Cairo set out to beautify their city ahead of a state visit. They had five days to complete their work. The team, calling themselves Rasmet Basma, used an AI programme called ChatGPT to generate designs, then painted them onto walls across the capital. Forty murals in total were commissioned for the occasion—a standard civic beautification effort for a dignitary's arrival. One of those murals, stretching 66 metres across Tahrir Square, depicted two of ancient Egypt's most recognizable figures: the Pharaoh Tutankhamun and Queen Nefertiti.

The mural was completed without incident. Officials visited the site throughout the process. The Cairo deputy governor and the district head saw the work and expressed satisfaction. Then, as the Chinese president Xi Jinping's visit drew near, something shifted. Social media erupted. The controversy centred on a single detail: the way the volunteers had rendered the pharaohs' skin. They had used a golden-bronze tone that, under night lighting, created shadows that made the figures appear dark-skinned. For some Egyptians online, this choice carried a loaded meaning. They saw it as a visual endorsement of Afrocentrism—a political movement asserting that ancient Egyptian civilization was fundamentally black African in origin.

Ahmed Moussa, the 22-year-old founder of Rasmet Basma, later acknowledged what happened next. The Cairo governorate asked the team to paint over their work. Hours before Xi landed, the mural vanished under fresh paint. Moussa reflected on the decision: "We acknowledge our mistake in not consulting specialists in archaeology and art." The golden-bronze technique, he explained, had been chosen to create visual depth, not to make a statement about ethnicity. But the damage, in the eyes of officials, was already done.

The incident tapped into a debate that has simmered in Egypt for years. Zahi Hawass, the country's former antiquities minister, defended the decision to remove the mural. He argued that a site as significant as Tahrir Square should never have been painted without expert oversight. On the substance of the controversy itself, he was unambiguous: "Claims linking ancient Egyptian civilisation to sub-Saharan Africa are nonsense." He pointed to temple carvings from the late period showing Egyptian kings depicted alongside captives from various regions—Africa, Libya, Syria, Palestine—with the kings themselves shown as lighter-skinned.

But other scholars offered a more complicated picture. Monica Hanna, an Egyptologist and assistant professor of archaeology at the American University of Iraq–Baghdad, rejected Afrocentric claims as pseudoscience. Yet she also pushed back against the idea that ancient Egypt had a single, fixed complexion. "Egyptians were never one skin colour," she said. "We are not snow-white, or the colour of cream." Egyptian society, she noted, had always been ethnically diverse—Nubian communities in the south, Mediterranean populations in the north, and countless migrations and mixtures in between.

The broader question raised by the incident concerned not just history but technology. Walid Mahmoud, an AI researcher and expert in African anthropology, pointed out that tools like ChatGPT reflect the information most widely circulated online, not necessarily what is factually accurate. These systems are built by companies in the US and Europe, he noted, and the images they generate can shape how those audiences—and others—see themselves and their heritage. "That's why we should never simply accept what it produces, especially when it comes to cultural identity and heritage," he said.

Mostafa Eissa, an art critic, raised a related concern about the role of AI in creative work. He argued that technology should remain a tool in the artist's hands, never a substitute for human judgment and skill. Letting such systems make decisions risked draining a work of its originality and meaning. The mural's disappearance, then, pointed to multiple failures at once: a lack of expert consultation, a reliance on AI without human oversight, and a political decision made in haste to avoid controversy. What remained was a blank wall and a question about who gets to decide how Egypt's past is represented.