An Old Argument, A New Headline
Ancient Kemet has never been treated as anything other than what it was: an African civilisation, built by an African population, on African soil. That is not a slogan here, it is the starting point for how we read the artwork, the architecture and the written record. So when a story broke this month showing modern Egyptian authorities erasing murals of Tutankhamun and Nefertiti for looking too African, it landed exactly where you would expect it to.
The story has already been picked up by international outlets, i24NEWS among them, sourcing from Al Arabiya. Two murals, painted on a wall in Tahrir Square within sight of the Egyptian Museum, showed the pharaoh and his stepmother, or possibly grandmother, with fuller lips, broader noses and darker skin than critics were comfortable with. The backlash was swift. The murals were gone within days. What follows is not really a story about paint on a wall. It is a story about who modern Egypt has decided gets to look like Tutankhamun, and who does not.
What Was Actually Erased
According to the reporting, the murals drew criticism from people who accused the artists of pushing an “Afrocentric” narrative, the theory, as the article rather generously called it, that ancient Egyptian civilisation originated with Black African peoples. Others complained specifically about the murals’ location, a few steps from the flagship museum of Egyptian antiquity, as though depicting the pharaohs with African features so close to the collection itself was the greater offence. Cairo Governorate authorities responded quickly, taking the murals down, with officials promising to restore the wall in a manner they described as artistically and historically accurate.
That phrase is worth sitting with. Historically accurate, according to the same institutions that spent the mural’s short life insisting the opposite of what its own antiquities collection shows.
Here is the detail that undoes the entire complaint before it starts: both murals were painted gold. Gilded, not brown, not black, gold, in keeping with how Egyptian royalty was traditionally rendered in death masks, sarcophagi and temple reliefs. Skin tone was never actually the issue, whatever the coverage implied. What upset critics was the shape of the faces underneath the gold: the lips, the nose, the structure that read, unmistakably to them, as African. A gilded pharaoh was fine. A gilded pharaoh with African features was not.
What the Evidence Actually Shows
None of this needs to be argued from theory when the physical evidence is sitting in museums and tomb chambers that anyone can go and look at. Tutankhamun’s own funerary equipment, the most extensively documented royal assemblage from ancient Egypt, shows him repeatedly with full lips and a broad nose, on his coffins, his shabtis, his statuary. This is not a single contested piece open to interpretation. It is the consistent artistic record of how his household chose to represent him across dozens of objects, produced by his own culture, for his own burial, with no outside audience to please.
Nefertiti’s record tells the same story once you look past the one image everyone defaults to. Her steles, her reliefs from Amarna, the depictions of her alongside Akhenaten and their children, and a plaster face mould taken directly from a life or death cast, all show a woman with fuller features than the image that has come to stand in for her internationally. Her children, depicted repeatedly in the Amarna material, show the same pattern. This is a family that was consistently rendered, across an enormous body of surviving art, with features that would today be read as African.
That last point matters because it is precisely the population Egyptian authorities have spent this controversy insisting has no claim on the ancient civilisation.
The Berlin Bust: An Outlier With a Complicated History
The image doing the real work in the public imagination, the one people picture the instant Nefertiti’s name comes up, is the painted bust in Berlin’s Neues Museum. It is worth being honest about what that object actually is and how it got there, because its status as the definitive Nefertiti owes more to twentieth-century politics than to its place in the wider body of her portraiture.
The bust was found in 1912 in the Amarna workshop of the sculptor Thutmose, made of a limestone core finished in painted stucco. It is missing its left eye inlay, its shoulders are cut vertically rather than the horizontal style typical of other Egyptian bust fragments, and no scientific documentation of the find appeared for over a decade after its discovery. Those genuine oddities led the Swiss art historian Henri Stierlin, and later the writer Erdoğan Ercivan, to argue in 2009 that the piece was a modern studio creation rather than a genuine Amarna-period work. Berlin’s Egyptian Museum has rejected that theory, citing CT scans and material analysis carried out in 2013 that found the pigments and stone consistent with the period. It is fair to note that testing supports the object’s antiquity even as some of the anomalies Stierlin raised, the eye, the shoulders, the documentation gap, have never been fully explained away, only outweighed. In addition, the eyebrows and eyelashes of the Berlin bust are painted rather than inlaid, contrary to the usual convention of the period; ancient Egyptian sculptors typically produced monolithic statues and discarded pieces when errors occurred, a practice that sits uneasily with the plaster-augmented nature of the Berlin bust; and the bust’s unusually light complexion stands out against the more typical brownish pigment used for female figures or the yellow tones that indicated gold. The missing left eye inlay itself is highly peculiar and, according to some critics, would be impossible in a genuine ancient Egyptian artefact, since paired rock crystal eyes were normally created and set together. This one-eyed feature has therefore drawn specific forgery claims: it has been alleged that the necessary rock crystal eye inlays could not be fully sourced at the time, and that only a single suitable piece was available. On this view, finding matching rock crystal and crafting a spare eye identical to the surviving one would have been impossible in 1912, a practical difficulty that, for these authors, further strengthens the argument that the bust is a modern fabrication rather than an authentic Amarna-period work.
Whatever its origin, the bust did not become the world’s Nefertiti by artistic consensus. Egypt formally requested its return as early as the 1920s and again in 1929, and by 1933 Germany had all but agreed to send it back, until Adolf Hitler personally vetoed the deal. He was reportedly taken with the bust’s features and planned to make it a centrepiece of his proposed museum in a renamed Berlin, and the piece was later found hidden alongside looted Nazi art in a salt mine at the war’s end. A single workshop piece, quite possibly a study model or a “modello” for future royal images rather than a finished portrait in its own right, became the fixed international image of an Egyptian queen partly because a fascist government took a liking to how European it could be made to look. That is the object modern authorities keep reaching for when they say a mural does not match the historical record.
Whose Identity Is Actually Being Preserved
Reporting on the backlash noted that critics framed their objection around preserving Egyptian identity, and that some viewed the wider spread of Afrocentric narratives as a threat to that identity and to national heritage. It is worth asking plainly what identity is actually being protected here, because it is not the one on display in the museum a few steps from where the murals stood.
This has played out in public before. Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s former Minister of Antiquities and the country’s most prominent Egyptologist, has repeatedly and publicly rejected claims that ancient Egyptian civilisation had Black African origins, most recently dismissing a 2023 Netflix depiction of Cleopatra as inaccurate and describing Afrocentric visitors to the Cairo museum as spreading fantasy. His argument rests heavily on contrasting Egyptian royal imagery with depictions of bound Nubian, Libyan and Levantine captives on temple walls, on the basis that the two are drawn differently. That the ruling family and conquered captives were rendered with deliberate artistic distinctions in state propaganda art is not, on its own, evidence about the ethnic character of the population as a whole, and it sits uneasily next to the tomb goods and steles that show the royal family itself with the very features now being scrubbed off a wall in Tahrir Square.
There is also a chronological problem with the underlying claim of continuity. The identity being defended as authentically Egyptian by the loudest critics is bound up with an Arab cultural and linguistic inheritance that arrived with the seventh-century conquest, more than three thousand years after Nefertiti and Tutankhamun’s era. The same pattern shows up region-wide: achievements from Mesopotamia, Anatolia and North Africa are frequently folded into a single Arab lineage regardless of the actual population history involved. A modern national identity has every right to exist on its own terms. It does not thereby earn a monopoly on the appearance of people who lived three and a half thousand years before that identity existed.
A Pattern, Not an Accident
It would be easier to read this mural episode as an isolated flare-up if Egypt’s own Black population were not already dealing with a long, well-documented pattern of exactly this attitude. Nubians, indigenous to the Nile Valley stretching from Aswan into northern Sudan, have been repeatedly displaced by dam construction over the twentieth century and are regularly stereotyped in Egyptian media as servants and doormen, a pattern the Media Diversity Institute and Minority Rights Group have both documented in detail, right down to Egyptian public figures making exactly that comparison to a Nubian footballer on national television. That is the same population whose features, when they turn up on a royal mural instead of a museum information panel, get called an agenda rather than a heritage.
Nobody needed to invent a controversy here. The murals were gold, in keeping with how Egyptian royalty was always shown. The features matched the tomb goods, the steles and the family portraits that have survived for three and a half thousand years. What could not survive contact with modern Egyptian nationalism was the shape of the faces underneath the gold. Repainting the wall will not change what is sitting in the museum it stands next to.
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