Overview
Luxor is Egypt’s number two destination for visitors after the greater Cairo/Giza area further north. Luxor is the area I call the land of tombs and temples because, while there are certainly tombs and temples all over Egypt, Luxor is where the most magnificent ones are located.
Most notably in Luxor we have the Valley of the Kings with the splendid underground tombs of some of ancient Egypt’s greatest pharaohs, and we have the greatest temple to the gods of ancient Egypt, Karnak Temple, which is also located in Luxor. So alongside the Pyramids back up in Cairo/Giza, Luxor is iconic and synonymous with ancient Egypt.
Ok, let’s begin by talking about where precisely Luxor is. It’s clearly in Egypt, but it’s quite a hike or a caravan away from Cairo. Cairo is in the north of the country not far from the Mediterranean Sea. Luxor, however, is way further south in the lower part of the country about roughly two-thirds the way down the length of Egypt.
Luxor is the modern Arabic name for the city that sits on the site of the ancient capital of the Kingdom of Upper Egypt (i.e., the south of Egypt further up the Nile River, since it flows north). Egypt used to be divided into two separate kingdoms until the Pharoah Narmer aka Menes came along and united the two lands under his rule around 3000 BC, or roughly 5000 years ago. So Luxor was the capital of Upper Egypt before unification and it was the capital of the united Egyptian empire for nearly a thousand years during the height of ancient Egypt’s power.
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But as I said earlier, Luxor is the Arabic name for the ancient city that it acquired after the Arabs invaded and settled much later. In ancient Egyptian times, the capital here was known by several names like Waset and Nowe and Ta-ope, none of which we really hear of anymore because most ancient Egyptian names for people and places have been replaced by the names later given to them by their conquerors. The capital Waset was later renamed Thebes by the Greeks and, as we’ve established, later yet Luxor by the Arabs, which is, of course, what we still call the city today.
During its heyday though, Luxor was a capital city of immense wealth and extravagance. Some of Egypt’s greatest and richest kings made their homes here and ruled from here, and they showered the city and its surrounding area with lavish building projects of monuments and temples and the like. And many of them had themselves and their families buried here too in elaborate secret tombs fit for the god-king status they bestowed upon themselves.
Most of these ancient temples and palaces have, of course, been destroyed over the past several thousand years, but lucky for us and almost incredibly, some of them have survived and are intact today for us to visit, walkthrough, and experience what the splendor of ancient Egypt was actually like.
