Luxor travel guide

Top 10 sights in Luxor

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1. 

   1© Fotograf/Photographer: Peter J. Bubenik (1995) · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Valley of the Kings

   A dry valley across the river from Luxor where pharaohs were buried for some five hundred years, from the eighteenth to the twentieth dynasty, in tombs cut deep into the rock. More than sixty have been found; Tutankhamun's, opened in 1922, was the only one still full.

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2. 

   2© Rémih · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Thebes

   The Egyptians called it Waset; it was the capital through most of the New Kingdom and the centre of the cult of Amun. The temples on the east bank and the tombs on the west are World Heritage together.

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3. 

   3© Vyacheslav Argenberg · CC BY 4.0

   Karnak Temple Complex

   Two square kilometres of temple built and rebuilt over some two thousand years, from the Middle Kingdom to the Ptolemies, and the largest religious complex ever raised anywhere. Its hypostyle hall stands on a hundred and thirty-four sandstone columns, the tallest twenty-four metres, and an avenue of sphinxes ran three kilometres from it to Luxor temple.

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4. 

   4© Ad Meskens · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Luxor Temple

   A temple on the east bank begun about 1400 BC under Amenhotep III and extended by Ramesses II, joined to Karnak by an avenue of sphinxes three kilometres long that was cleared and reopened in 2021. A mosque still stands inside its courtyard, built when the temple was buried to the shoulders in sand.

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5. 

   5© Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Valley of the Queens

   A wadi south of the Valley of the Kings holding some ninety tombs of queens, princes and princesses from about 1560 to 1130 BC. Nefertari's, cut for the wife of Ramesses II, has the finest painting in Egypt and is opened to a small number of visitors a day at a separate and very high price.

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6. 

   6© Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Deir el-Bahari

   A bay in the cliffs of the west bank holding two mortuary temples, Hatshepsut's terraces and the older, ruined complex of Mentuhotep II, who reunited Egypt around 2040 BC. Fifty-eight tourists and four Egyptians were murdered here by militants in November 1997.

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7. 

   7© EditorfromMars · CC BY-SA 4.0

   tomb of Tutankhamun

   KV62, the smallest royal tomb in the valley, opened by Howard Carter on 4 November 1922 with more than five thousand objects packed into four rooms. Tutankhamun himself is still there, in the outermost coffin in a climate-controlled case; everything else is in Cairo.

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8. 

   8© MusikAnimal · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Colossi of Memnon

   Two quartzite statues of Amenhotep III, eighteen metres high, all that is left of the largest temple ever built on the west bank. An earthquake in 27 BC cracked the northern one, after which it emitted a sound at dawn that Roman tourists came to hear until Severus repaired it in AD 199 and silenced it.

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9. 

   9© Steve F-E-Cameron · CC BY 3.0

   Theban Necropolis

   The whole west bank burial ground opposite Luxor, used for most of the pharaonic period: the Valley of the Kings, the Valley of the Queens, the nobles' tombs cut into the hill at Sheikh Abd el-Qurna, and Deir el-Medina, the village of the men who dug all of them.

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10. 

    10© Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0

    Ramesseum

    The memorial temple of Ramesses II on the west bank, where a fallen colossus of the king — once about eighteen metres — lies broken in the forecourt. Its wreckage prompted Shelley's Ozymandias, written without ever seeing it.

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1. 

   1© 𐰇𐱅𐰚𐰤 · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Merneptah Stele

   A granite stele inscribed for the pharaoh Merneptah about 1208 BC, found at Thebes in 1896 and now in Cairo. Among the peoples it lists as defeated is Israel, the earliest mention of that name anywhere.

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2. 

   2© Ian Lloyd · CC BY-SA 3.0

   mortuary temple of Hatshepsut

   Three colonnaded terraces set against the cliff at Deir el-Bahari, built for Hatshepsut by her steward Senenmut and unlike any other Egyptian temple. Her successor Thutmose III had her name and face chiselled out of it after her death, which is why the reliefs are so heavily patched.

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3. 

   3© Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0

   KV9

   The tomb of Ramesses V and VI, begun by the first and appropriated by the second. Its unusually complete astronomical ceiling sets out the Book of the Day against the Book of the Night, and classical visitors scratched their names across the entrance from the third century BC onward.

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4. 

   4© Roland Unger · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Medinet Habu

   The memorial temple of Ramesses III, and the best-preserved of its kind in Egypt — the roofs are largely on and the paint is still in the reliefs. Its outer walls record the war against the Sea Peoples in detail found nowhere else.

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5. 

   5© Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Deir el-Medina

   The village of the craftsmen who cut and painted the royal tombs, occupied for four centuries. The rubbish they left — thousands of inscribed sherds — records wages, lawsuits, love poems and, in 1152 BC, the first recorded strike in history.

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6. 

   6© Jean-Pierre Dalbéra · CC BY 2.0

   KV17

   The tomb of Seti I, the longest and most finely decorated in the valley, running over a hundred metres into the rock. Belzoni found it in 1817 and hacked casts from the walls; it has been open again in recent years at a premium ticket.

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7. 

   7© Roland Unger · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Malkata

   The palace city of Amenhotep III south of Medinet Habu, built of mud brick with painted floors and ceilings, and served by an artificial harbour more than two kilometres long. Little stands above knee height, but the plan is vast.

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8. 

   8

   Mortuary Temple of Ramesses III

   The temple at the heart of Medinet Habu, raised by Ramesses III around 1170 BC on the model of the Ramesseum and fortified like a migdol gate. Its painted reliefs are the fullest surviving record of a New Kingdom war.

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9. 

   9© R.F.Morgan · CC BY-SA 3.0

   WV22

   The tomb of Amenhotep III in the western branch of the valley, unusual in having separate suites prepared for his queen Tiye and his daughter. Napoleon's engineers recorded it in 1799, by which time it had long been emptied.

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10. 

    10© derivative work: A. Parrot (talk) La_tombe_de_Horemheb_(KV.57)_(Vallée_des_Rois_ · CC BY 2.0

    KV57

    The tomb of Horemheb, last pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, in the Valley of the Kings. Edward Ayrton found it in February 1908; standing on the valley floor, it had filled with silt washed in by seasonal floods.

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