About twenty-six centuries before Columbus will sail the ocean blue, these Egyptian emissaries are paying their respects to a Preclassic Maya king after a long voyage across the Atlantic. While the native ruler offers his guests a cup of chocolate beverage, his mischievous daughter is eager to indulge her curiosity by touching one of the visitors’ hair…much to the Egyptian woman’s consternation, of course.
This is, of course, a fictional “alternate history” scenario. There have been some “Afrocentric” scholars such as Ivan Van Sertima arguing that the Egyptians or other Africans may have sailed across the Atlantic and made contact with early Mesoamerican civilizations such as the Olmecs and Maya, but most scholars consider this to be an unsubstantiated fringe hypothesis. Nonetheless, it would make for some appealing fiction.
By the way, if the Maya in this scene appear strangely large compared to the Egyptians, that’s because the particular Maya art pieces I referenced for this had a lot of chunky characters with big heads.