A dry desert valley behind the Luxor west bank holding more than sixty rock-cut royal tombs, many with their painted decoration intact.
The Valley of the Kings is a narrow, bare, hot limestone valley behind the cliffs of the Luxor west bank. There is nothing to see on the surface. Everything is underground.
More than sixty tombs have been found here, cut into the rock for the pharaohs of the New Kingdom over roughly five hundred years. A rotating handful are open on any given day.
The colour. Egyptian temples are stone that has lost its paint; these tombs kept theirs. Ceilings of deep blue with yellow stars, walls of figures in red and green and white, hieroglyphs as crisp as the day they were cut. Nothing in the open-air sites prepares you for it.
The engineering is its own subject. These are corridors driven hundreds of metres into solid rock with copper tools, descending on a planned axis, with pillared halls and burial chambers at the end. The tomb of Seti I is the longest and finest of them, and if it is open and you can afford the supplement, it is the single most impressive interior in Egypt.
And there is Tutankhamun. His tomb is small, plain and unremarkable by the standards of the valley — it was not built for a king who would die at nineteen — but his mummy is still there, which is not true of any other pharaoh in the valley.
From roughly the 16th century BC, the pharaohs stopped building pyramids and began hiding their tombs in this valley, behind a natural pyramid-shaped peak. The theory was concealment. It did not work: almost every tomb was robbed in antiquity, most of them within a few generations.
The workers who cut and painted the tombs lived at Deir el-Medina, a village a short distance away whose own ruins and records survive — including the ordinary complaints, work rosters and pay disputes of the men doing the job.
Tutankhamun's tomb escaped serious robbery largely by accident: debris from a later tomb buried its entrance. Howard Carter found it in 1922, and its contents are now displayed together at the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza.
At opening, without exception. October to April for a comfortable visit; June to August demands the first hour of the day.
Opening hours: Opens early and closes in the late afternoon, with seasonal variation. Some tombs close individually for conservation.
Opening hours and ticket prices may change. Please confirm the latest details before visiting.
The village of the men who cut and painted the royal tombs — the most completely documented community to survive from the ancient world.
The southern valley of the Theban necropolis, where queens and royal children were buried — and where the finest painted tomb in Egypt is cut into the rock.
A sunrise flight over the west bank — temples, tombs, sugar cane fields and the Nile, from a few hundred metres up.
The mortuary temple of Ramesses III — the best-preserved painted colour of any large temple in Egypt, and almost always empty.
Two enormous seated statues standing in a field — all that is easily visible of what was once the largest temple in Egypt.
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