If there is one place where ancient Egypt feels more alive and monumental than anywhere else, it is Luxor. Over the ruins of ancient Thebes, the capital of the pharaohs at the peak of their power, lies a city that is, quite literally, the greatest open-air museum on the planet. On one side of the Nile, on the bank of the living, rise the enormous temples of Karnak and Luxor. On the other, on the bank of the dead, the sun sets every evening over the Valley of the Kings, where Tutankhamun, Ramesses and Seti I were laid to rest in tombs carved and painted into the rock.
Luxor overwhelms by sheer accumulation: there is not one monument but dozens, any of which would be the star attraction in any other country. Gigantic columns covered in hieroglyphs, avenues of sphinxes, obelisks, seated colossi, tombs with starry ceilings and walls that still keep colours from three thousand years ago. And all of it on the banks of the Nile, that eternal river where a white-sailed felucca still glides by at sunset, while at dawn hot-air balloons float over the mortuary temples of the west bank.
This guide looks at Luxor with a practical eye: how to plan the two banks so you neither get lost nor melt in the heat, which temples and tombs are unmissable, how much the tickets cost (many are paid separately and it is worth booking), how to cross the Nile, where to stay and how to connect with the cruise to Aswan. Luxor is the heart of pharaonic Egypt: coming here means walking through the very stage on which the great pharaohs wielded their power.
Luxor stands on ancient Thebes (Waset to the Egyptians), a city that was the capital of Egypt for much of the New Kingdom (16th to 11th centuries BC), the most glorious and powerful era of pharaonic civilisation, the age of Thutmose, Hatshepsut, Amenhotep, Akhenaten, Tutankhamun and Ramesses. Dedicated to the god Amun, who from here became the great deity of the Egyptian pantheon, Thebes amassed immense wealth and power, reflected in the colossal temples of Karnak and Luxor on the east bank, and in the vast royal necropolis of the west bank, with the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens and the great mortuary temples. After the decline of the New Kingdom, Thebes lost its status as capital but remained a major religious centre until Graeco-Roman times. With Christianity and Islam, its temples were transformed or abandoned, and a village grew up on top of them. The Arabic name Al-Uqsur, 'the palaces' or 'the castles' (from which Luxor comes), refers to the monuments that peeked out between the houses. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Upper Egypt of great temples and royal tombs: Thebes (Luxor), Karnak, the Valley of the Kings, Aswan, Philae and Abu Simbel, linked by the classic Nile cruise.
Read the history of The Nile Valley: Luxor and Aswan →Some places make no sense on your own; with someone explaining them, they change completely. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have 15 activities in Luxor. Three are below so you get the idea: tap any of them and they all open.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The city we now call Luxor was, in antiquity, Thebes, which the Egyptians called Waset. At first it was nothing more than a modest town in Upper Egypt, without the importance of the old capitals of the north such as Memphis. Its rise began around the second millennium BC, when Theban princes managed to reunify Egypt after periods of division and founded dynasties that ruled from here. But the great leap came when Theban pharaohs expelled the Hyksos, invaders from Asia who had dominated the north of the country, around 1550 BC. That victory opened the New Kingdom, the most glorious, wealthy and powerful era in all of pharaonic history, with Thebes as its capital.
For almost five centuries, the great pharaohs of the New Kingdom (Thutmose, Amenhotep, Hatshepsut, Akhenaten, Tutankhamun, Seti and Ramesses) made Thebes the centre of an empire that stretched from Nubia in the south to Syria in the north. Tribute and plunder from military campaigns, along with the agricultural wealth of the Nile valley, paid for an unmatched explosion of monumental building. Thebes filled up with temples, palaces and avenues, and its population and splendour made it one of the largest cities in the world of its time. Centuries later, the Greek poet Homer would call it 'hundred-gated Thebes', a symbol of fabulous wealth.
The city was organised in two halves separated by the Nile, with a deep religious meaning: the east bank, where the sun rises, belonged to the living and held the great temples; the west bank, where the sun dies each evening, belonged to the dead and held the necropolises and mortuary temples. That division between life and death, marked by the river and the path of the sun, is the key to understanding Luxor.
The splendour of Thebes is inseparable from the rise of a god: Amun. At first Amun was just a local Theban deity, but as the city and its pharaohs grew in power, he grew too, until he merged with the ancient sun god Ra to become Amun-Ra, the 'king of the gods' and the supreme deity of the Egyptian pantheon during the New Kingdom. Every military victory and every pharaoh credited Amun with their success, and in gratitude gave him temples, land, treasure and slaves.
The result of that devotion, built up over centuries, is the gigantic complex of Karnak on the east bank, the largest religious precinct ever built in ancient Egypt. It is not the work of a single pharaoh but of dozens of them over more than two thousand years: each king added his pylon, his hall, his obelisk or his chapel, in a contest of piety and power that made the temple grow to an almost unfathomable size. Its Great Hypostyle Hall, with 134 colossal columns, is one of the wonders of architecture of all time. Nearby, Luxor Temple, linked to Karnak by a great avenue of sphinxes, was the setting for the Opet festival, the great yearly celebration that renewed the pharaoh's divine power.
So much wealth had a political consequence: the priesthood of Amun, which managed enormous estates and treasures, became so powerful that it came to rival the pharaoh himself. That excessive priestly power was one of the reasons that drove the pharaoh Akhenaten, in the 14th century BC, to a radical religious revolution: abolishing the worship of Amun and the other gods, imposing the sole worship of the sun disc Aten and moving the capital far from Thebes. It was a short-lived experiment: after his death, his successor, the young Tutankhamun, restored the worship of Amun and returned Thebes to its splendour.
On the west bank, the bank of the dead, the pharaohs of the New Kingdom made a decision that changed the history of royal tombs. The pyramids of the Old Kingdom, visible and monumental, had been plundered again and again despite every precaution. So the kings of Thebes chose the opposite approach: secrecy. They picked a remote desert valley, hidden behind the mountains of the west bank and overlooked by a naturally pyramid-shaped peak (El-Qurn), and carved their tombs into the rock there, hidden and unmarked. That is how the Valley of the Kings was born.
For almost five centuries, from the 16th to the 11th century BC, more than sixty pharaohs and other leading figures were buried here, in tombs that are long descending corridors cut into the stone, with burial chambers whose walls were covered in religious texts and painted scenes (the 'Book of the Dead', the 'Book of Gates', journeys through the underworld, starry skies) meant to guide and protect the king on his eternal journey towards resurrection. Shielded from light for thousands of years, the colours of many of these paintings are still astonishingly vivid.
The secrecy, however, didn't fully work: almost every tomb was robbed in antiquity. The great exception, and the most famous find in archaeology, was the tomb of Tutankhamun, a minor pharaoh who died very young, whose burial went unnoticed for more than three thousand years until the British archaeologist Howard Carter found it intact in 1922, with its fabulous treasure of gold. That discovery set off 'Egyptomania' around the world and made Tutankhamun the most famous pharaoh in history, even though in life he was one of the least important.
Nothing lasts forever, and neither did the power of Thebes. Towards the end of the New Kingdom, in the 11th century BC, Egypt entered a long period of crisis, division and weakness. Political power shifted north to the cities of the Delta, and Thebes lost its status as capital, although for a long time it kept its enormous religious prestige as the holy city of Amun. The wealth and influence of the Theban priesthood endured, but the city was no longer the heart of pharaonic power.
In 663 BC, Thebes suffered a brutal blow: it was sacked by the Assyrians during their invasions of Egypt, an episode that symbolically marked the end of its greatness. Later, under the Persians, the Ptolemaic Greeks and the Romans, the city remained a religious centre and a revered place, and some of its temples were enlarged or restored. Tourists in antiquity, Greeks and Romans, were already visiting Thebes just as we do: they came to marvel at the Colossi of Memnon, and many carved their names into the stone, in the first tourist graffiti in history.
With the arrival of Christianity, the old pagan temples were abandoned or repurposed: in some, such as Deir el-Bahari or Luxor Temple itself, churches and communities of Coptic monks moved in (hence names like 'Deir', which means monastery). Many reliefs of gods were damaged out of religious zeal. Ancient Thebes, by then depopulated and in ruins, was reduced to a handful of villages that grew up among and on top of the monuments, reusing their stones and walls. The power and splendour of the pharaohs' capital had faded, but its temples and tombs, protected by the dry desert climate, lay waiting beneath the sand.
The modern world's rediscovery of Thebes began with Napoleon's expedition to Egypt (1798-1801), whose scholars drew and described in amazement the temples and colossi rising among the villages. Throughout the 19th century, with the birth of Egyptology after Champollion deciphered hieroglyphs, Luxor became a magnet for archaeologists, collectors and adventurers from all over Europe, who excavated its temples and tombs, sometimes with methods that would horrify us today. Many treasures left the country then, bound for museums in London, Paris, Turin or Berlin.
The 20th century brought the great scientific discoveries and the most famous of them all: Howard Carter's discovery of Tutankhamun's intact tomb in 1922, funded by Lord Carnarvon, which filled front pages across the world and sparked a fascination with Egypt that has never faded. The legend of the 'curse of the pharaoh', fuelled by the press after Carnarvon's death, added an air of mystery that still lingers.
In 1979, UNESCO declared 'Ancient Thebes with its Necropolis' a World Heritage Site, recognising the exceptional concentration of monuments in this unique place. Today Luxor is one of Egypt's great tourist capitals, living largely off the legacy of its pharaohs. The city has been recovering and showcasing its treasures, such as the restoration of the great avenue of sphinxes linking Karnak and Luxor, reopened with a spectacular ceremony in 2021, and it remains the heart of pharaonic Egypt: the largest open-air museum in the world, where you can walk among thousand-year-old columns as the sun sets over the bank of the dead and balloons float over the temples at dawn.
