A temple in the middle of a living city, built for a festival rather than a god, and the one major Egyptian site that is better after dark.
Luxor Temple sits in the middle of modern Luxor, at the end of a corniche, surrounded by the town rather than out in the desert. You can walk to it from most hotels on the east bank.
It is smaller and far more legible than Karnak — one long axis you can walk from pylon to sanctuary in twenty minutes — and it is the single best evening visit in Egypt.
It is floodlit at night, and it is one of the very few Egyptian sites where the lighting has been done thoughtfully rather than blasted at the stone. The colonnade of Amenhotep III after dark, with the columns picked out and the sky black above them, is the image most people take home from Luxor.
It also does something no other Egyptian temple does as clearly: it shows you continuous religious use for three and a half thousand years, stacked in one building. Pharaonic sanctuary, a chapel converted by Roman soldiers with the painted plaster still visible over the reliefs, a Christian church, and a working mosque built high up on the accumulated debris — all of it still standing in the same walls.
The Avenue of Sphinxes runs from its front gate. It once connected Luxor Temple to Karnak, nearly three kilometres north, and it has been excavated and reopened along its whole length.
The temple was built mainly by Amenhotep III in the 14th century BC and extended by Ramesses II, who added the great forecourt, the pylon and the colossal seated statues of himself at the entrance.
Its resident god was Amun in a particular form — Amenemopet, Amun of Opet — but the building's real purpose was the Opet festival, when the images of the Theban gods were carried in procession from Karnak to Luxor to renew the king's divine kingship. The temple is, in effect, a destination for an annual parade.
One of the pair of obelisks that stood at the entrance is still in place. The other was given to France in the nineteenth century and stands in the Place de la Concorde in Paris. Above the eastern side of the forecourt sits the mosque of Abu Haggag, built when the temple was buried nearly to its capitals — which is why its door is now several metres above the excavated ground.
In January 1989 work in the sun court of Amenhotep III uncovered a pit of statues buried in antiquity. Twenty-six came out of it, barely weathered, including a near-perfect quartzite figure of the king. They are now shown together in the Luxor Museum.
Around AD 300 the temple stood inside a Roman legionary fortress, and the chamber beyond the hypostyle hall was replastered and painted for the imperial cult — Diocletian and his co-emperors over the pharaonic relief. The American Research Center in Egypt conserved it in the 2000s.
After sunset. The temple is at its best floodlit, and it is also the coolest time to walk it.
Opening hours: Open into the evening, later than most Egyptian sites. Check current closing time locally.
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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