The mural, stretching three blocks along a wall off Cairo's Tahrir Square, has been a sort of open-air museum of the history of the revolution and its goals — with "martyr" portraits of slain protesters, graffiti, jokes, freedom slogans and pharaonic, Muslim, Christian and nationalist images to show Egypt's mixed heritage and a history of struggle.

Word of the whitewash quickly got out. A number of progressive, young revolutionaries showed up to defend the murals. In the dead of night, they began to film the workers as they painted under the guard of police, hoping to embarrass them. They talked with the painters about what the murals meant.

The scene on Mohamed Mahmoud Street in the early hours Wednesday was a small but telling counterpoint to last week's angry protests at the US Embassy, led by ultraconservative Islamists protesting an anti-Islam film. Those protests took place only a few blocks away on another street off Tahrir.

Together, the scenes point to the competition over the identity of the new Egypt, over what the country stands for now and what can be expressed.

The mix of largely secular activists who launched the revolt against longtime leader Hosni Mubarak last year say the "revolution" is still continuing, until the country breaks with its authoritarian past and brings freedoms and economic justice.

"They are erasing history," Gamal Abdel Nasser, the father of a 19-year old killed during the early days of anti-Mubarak protests, said as he stood at the mural street. "This is not my government. It doesn't represent me."

And for some, repainting the wall just underlined the feeling that the Islamists have snatched the prizes of the revolution.

"This is not about the wall. It is about everything happening in Egypt," said Nazly Hussein, one of the first to arrive at the scene to protest the paint job with a camera, live streaming the workers as they covered murals. "It is about territory they took away from us."

After the intervention by activists, the municipal workers stopped the whitewashing at daybreak with only half the mural painted over. Graffiti artists moved in to start putting new images on the now white walls. By late Wednesday night, the municipal workers hadn't returned to finish their job, amid a media uproar over the mural erasure.

The first drawing to go up was a portrait of a young man sticking his green tongue as a taunt. "Do it again! Erase, you cowardly regime," was written beneath it.

Graffiti artist Ahmed Nadi painted a new caricature of Morsi, smiling smugly, with the words, "Happy now, Morsi?"

Ali Saleh a 53-year old security guard at a nearby school, said the murals must stay as a reminder to authorities of the mistakes they committed.

"If we give up the graffiti, this would be the first nail in the coffin," he said. "We are in for a worse dictatorship than Mubarak's."