Travel to Luxor

Thebes rose to prominence around 2000 BCE and dominated Egyptian civilization for over fifteen centuries as the political, military, and religious capital during the Middle and New Kingdoms, an era of unprecedented monument-building and imperial expansion. The Greeks marveled at the city’s grandeur, calling it the “City of a Hundred Gates,” while the Egyptians themselves knew it as Waset—the city of the scepter, seat of power for the dynasties that built Egypt’s greatest monuments. At its peak around 1500 BCE during the reign of the Eighteenth Dynasty pharaohs, the population reached perhaps 50,000 inhabitants, making it one of the ancient world’s largest and most spectacular urban centers.

Today’s Luxor preserves this extraordinary legacy across both banks of the Nile, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979 under the title “Ancient Thebes with its Necropolis.” The East Bank holds the temples of Karnak and Luxor where priests once served the Theban Triad—Amun-Ra, his consort Mut, and their son Khonsu—in rituals that sustained the cosmic order. The West Bank, known as the “City of the Dead,” stretches across ten square kilometers of necropolis containing thousands of tombs carved into limestone cliffs, scores of mortuary temples, and the workers’ villages that served them. Together they constitute the most complete surviving record of Egyptian civilization during its greatest era of power and artistic achievement.