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Lying 420 miles south of Cairo and normally
visited on quick trips from the port of
Safaga, Luxor is the most important and
dramatic historical site in all Egypt, and
has often been called the world’s greatest
open-air museum. |
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Today,
Luxor is home to more than half of all of
Egypt’s antiquities and is a must-see
highlight on the itinerary of almost every
visitor to Egypt. The town has a village
atmosphere and a bustling local market, and
one of the most pleasant ways to get around
town is by the “caleches”, or two-person
horse carriages, that run along the Corniche. |
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MAJOR SIGHTS IN LUXOR |
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Valley of the Kings
The famous Valley of the Kings, where 62
Pharaohs are buried in rock-cut tombs, where
they were adorned with gold and jewels and
surrounded with treasures and replicas of
all they would need in the afterlife.
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Frustrated by the pillage of earlier more
visible tombs, they cut their tombs deep
into the sandstone, away from the public
view and separated from their mortuary
temples. The famous tomb of the boy-king
Tutankhamen was discovered here in 1922,
with over 5,000 precious items inside.
Although the mummy of the young king and his
treasures now lie in the Egyptian Museum in
Cairo, visitors can still look inside the
tomb itself and marvel at the
wall-paintings, and the stone sarcophagus in
which King Tut’s golden mummy-case was
laid. |
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Temple of Queen Hatshepsut
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Rising out of the desert plain, in a series
of terraces, the Mortuary Temple of Queen
Hatshepsut merges with the sheer limestone
cliffs of the eastern face of the Theban
Mountain as if nature herself had built this
extraordinary monument. |
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The partly rock-cut,
partly free-standing structure is one of the
finest monuments of ancient Egypt, although
its original appearance, surrounded by myrrh
trees, garden beds and approached by a grand
sphinx-lined causeway, must have been even
more spectacular. |
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Colossi of Memnon
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The
massive pair of statues known as the colossi
of Memnon are all that remain of the temple
of the hedonistic Amenophis III. |
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 Rising
about 18m from the surrounding plain, the
enthroned, faceless statues of Amenophis
have kept a lonely vigil on the changing
landscape around them for centuries,
surviving the rising floodwaters of the Nile
which gradually destroyed the temple
buildings behind them.
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The Temple of Karnak
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In the New Kingdom, Amun-Ra was worshipped
as the most important state god, and the
immense wealth of Thebes was spent
embellishing and building temples in his
honour. |
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The most famous and magnificent of
these is the Temple of Karnak, where 13
centuries of successive Pharaohs have
contributed to over 100 acres of majestic
pylons, hypostyle halls, and sacred
temples. The scale of Karnak surpasses
every other temple complex in the entire
ancient world. The
complex can be divided into three distinct
areas; the Amun Temple enclosure, which is
the largest Enclosure, the Mut Temple
Enclosure, which was once linked to the main
temple by an avenue of ram-headed sphinxes,
and the Montu Temple Enclosure which honored
the original local God of Thebes. |
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