Luxor

Luxor sits on the east bank of the Nile in Upper Egypt, about 700 kilometres south of Cairo, and it carries the weight of its history visibly and without much fuss. This was Thebes, capital of the New Kingdom pharaohs, the most powerful city in the ancient world for several centuries, and the remains are not tucked away in museums; they are in the city centre, on the riverbank, carved into the cliffs on the far side of the Nile. The description that gets used most often, the world's greatest open-air museum, is the kind of phrase that usually signals overselling. Here it is more or less accurate.

The Nile divides the city in a way that was never just geographical. The east bank, where the sun rises, was the side of the living, temples, markets, the city itself. The west bank, where the sun sets, was the side of the dead: tombs cut deep into the limestone hills, mortuary temples, the Valley of the Kings. That division has held for three thousand years and is still legible today.

We came to Luxor as the embarkation point for a week-long Nile cruise south to Aswan and back, on a small boat of twenty cabins. There was time to see the museum before boarding, and further visits on the return leg. I was shooting on a digital video camera at the time, early enough in my photography that almost nothing of the images survives. I remember the places more clearly than I documented them, which is perhaps as it should be.

Sights & Culture

Karnak Temple Complex

Karnak is not a single temple but an accumulation, built, extended, modified, and added to across roughly two thousand years of Egyptian history, and correspondingly vast. The site covers around two square kilometres and contains temples, chapels, pylons, and obelisks from the Middle Kingdom through to the Ptolemaic period. The scale becomes legible slowly.

One of the more quietly interesting details is the obelisk of Hatshepsut, which stands inside the complex half-concealed by the walls built around it by her successor Thutmose III. He couldn't destroy it, the stone was too massive and the act too conspicuous, so he built around it instead, obscuring it from view for most of the intervening millennia until the enclosure eventually crumbled. The obelisk is still standing.

Luxor Temple

In the centre of the modern city, close enough to the river that you can see it from the corniche, Luxor Temple has been in continuous religious use in one form or another since it was built by Amenhotep III around 1400 BCE. There is a mosque built inside the upper section, constructed before excavation revealed how much of the ancient structure lay beneath it. The temple is illuminated at night, unfortunately with green lasers that do it no particular favours. See it in daylight first.

The Avenue of Sphinxes

Karnak and Luxor were once connected by a three-kilometre processional avenue lined with sphinx statues, used during the Opet Festival when the statues of the gods were carried between the two temples. Excavation and restoration of the avenue was completed relatively recently and it is now possible to walk the full length of it, which gives a sense of the ceremonial scale of the ancient city that neither temple conveys on its own.

The Temple of Hatshepsut

On the west bank, cut into the cliffs at Deir el-Bahari, Hatshepsut's mortuary temple rises in three colonnaded terraces against the rock face. Hatshepsut ruled as pharaoh in her own right for around twenty years in the fifteenth century BCE, having initially served as regent for her young stepson Thutmose III. She adopted the full regalia of kingship, including the ceremonial beard, and the temple's reliefs document her divine legitimacy through the concept of the holy birth, the story of her conception by the god Amun-Ra, establishing her right to rule as his daughter. After her death, Thutmose III systematically removed or defaced her image and name from monuments across Egypt, an erasure so thorough that her existence was effectively unknown to modern scholars until the nineteenth century.

Colossi of Memnon

Two massive seated figures on the west bank plain, originally flanking the entrance to a mortuary temple of Amenhotep III that has since largely vanished. The statues were quarried in the Cairo region and transported to Luxor, a distance of around 700 kilometres, under Hatshepsut. They are, by any reasonable measure, an extraordinary thing to find standing in an open field.

Valley of the Kings

The royal necropolis on the west bank, used for pharaonic burials across five centuries of the New Kingdom. The ticket covers entry to three tombs from the accessible ones; others require separate permits. We chose KV2, the tomb of Ramesses IV, well-preserved, with extensive painted ceilings and walls, Seti II, and KV14, the double tomb of Tausert and Setnakhte. Tausert was one of only a handful of women to rule Egypt as pharaoh, her tomb subsequently enlarged and appropriated by her successor Setnakhte. It is one of the longer tombs in the valley and considerably less visited than the famous ones, which means you can actually look at it.

The painted decoration in all three is in better condition than you expect. The dry heat of the valley has been doing preservation work for three thousand years.

Luxor Museum

Smaller and more focused than the Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Luxor Museum has a well-curated collection covering the Theban region specifically, including pieces from Karnak and the royal tombs. Worth the time before or after the major sites, partly because the quieter context lets you look at individual objects properly.

Restaurants & Bars

Dinner on the East Bank

We ate well in Luxor. One evening in particular stands out: good food, unhurried service, and at some point during the meal a fight breaking out in the street outside that everyone inside largely ignored. The food kept coming. It was a fine evening.

Sports & Activities

Funtasia Project Centre (via Planeterra)

Organised through G Adventures' Planeterra foundation, this visit took us to a community project supporting local children. We were met by the kids themselves and taken on a guided bike ride through the neighbourhood; they led, we followed, before visiting their garden, looking at their artwork, and hearing about the centre's work. It is the kind of stop that could easily be tokenistic and wasn't. The bike ride alone was worth it.