Luxor's New Kingdom tombs and temples

Luxor (originally Waset, known to the Greeks as Thebes) was the capital of New Kingdom Egypt (~1550-1069 BCE) and the main center of worship for chief deity Amun-Ra. On Luxor's east bank of the Nile are the temples of Karnak and Luxor, and off in the desert to the west are hundreds of tombs, most famously the Valley of the Kings.

Luxor's enormous Temple of Karnak was the center of Egypt's religious life for centuries. Karnak was the site of the annual Opet festival, a 27-day festival led by the pharaoh to regenerate Amun and the cosmos. Karnak is one of the largest temple complexes in history, and at it's peak it employed an estimated 80,000 priests. Every pharaoh tried to make their mark and expand the temple: there's evidence of work done by over 30 pharaohs, so there is an overwhelming variety of architectural styles. Most impressive are the massive columns of the Hypostyle Hall. I got carried away taking photos, it's easy to understand why so many movies and video games use it as a setting.

Follow the route of the Opet festival down the 2.7km Avenue of Sphinxes (once lined by an estimated 1350 sphinxes) and you'll arrive at the Temple of Luxor. The temple has been a site of continuous worship since 1400 BCE: Alexander the Great added a chapel here (he allegedly visited), the Romans built a fort, and the Muslims added a mosque. The temple was buried in centuries of Nile mud and debris: the mosque was originally at ground level but is now 10m up! The cartouche of Ramses II is everywhere here: one theory is that he commissioned major restoration work on the temple and took every opportunity to sign his name. Also evident on the tops of some columns are the chiseled-out cartouches of Akhenaten, defaced after the Aten Heresy.

There are numerous other temple complexes, especially on the west bank, but many of the mud-brick temples were destroyed by centuries of Nile flooding.

On to the tombs! By the New Kingdom, pyramids were no longer in fashion: tombs were the new big thing. A new pharaoh's first order of business was starting work on their tomb. Workers would excavate a long hallway and rooms deep in the desert rock, and cover the walls with intricate hieroglyphics of the pharaoh's many accomplishments, plus reminders of all the rituals to complete in the afterlife. When the pharaoh died, they would be interred with great ceremony in an intricately decorated multi-stage sarcophagus, and the tomb would be filled with literal piles of treasure, furniture, food offerings, tiny sculpted figures to work for the pharaoh in the afterlife, etc.

But the best laid plans, right? If a pharaoh died young, the workers would frantically (author's interpretation) rush to finish whatever they could during the 70-day embalming process, or have to take over a tomb intended for someone else. So, short tomb, short reign. Also, the tombs were magnets for grave robbers. Tombs were already being plundered towards the end of the New Kingdom, and subsequent eras finished the job. Look closely and you'll find graffiti from every era- see if you can find "H Duff 1822" in one of my Karnak column pictures. By the modern era, absolutely everything valuable had been looted (with one notable exception), and all that was left were the wall inscriptions.

The best surviving example of wall art is the tomb of Nefertari, the favorite wife of Ramses II. Thanks to recent restoration work, the colors are vivid and striking. You'll have to take my word for it: photos aren't allowed, but there are some photo galleries online, and even a professionally captured VR game version. 

In total, we visited nine tombs in the Valley of the Kings (Ramses IV, Ramses IX, Merenptah, Tutankhamun), the nearby Valley of the Queens (Nefertari, Amen Khopshef, Titi, Khamwaset), and the enormous temple-tomb of Hatshepsut, one of the few female pharaohs. All(most all) empty, all stunning. 

The notable exception I've been alluding to is Tutankhamun's tomb! Undisturbed since 1323 BCE, it's famous rediscovery in 1922 reignited Egypt-mania. Tutankhamun is really only famous because of his tomb: it survived because he was so quickly forgotten and the entrance covered by later tomb excavations. The tomb itself is pretty small (he died early), but it's the only tomb where the original owner's mummy resides! All the good stuff, including his famous golden mask, is in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Quick aside- the mummies in many of the other tombs were looted in antiquity, but several dozen were removed for safekeeping and hidden by one of the last New Kingdom rulers, rediscovered in 1881, and are now also in the Egyptian Museum! No photos allowed.

The Egyptian Museum has some competition in Luxor: the Mummification Museum and Luxor Museum. The Luxor Museum is the best labeled, lit, and presented museum in all of Egypt! It has some excellent artifacts from the Aten Heresy, when Tutankamun's father Akhenaten radically reformed the Egyptian religion to worship only the sun disk Aten (these changes were unpopular and reversed after his death).

Luxor was a nice change of pace from urban Cairo: we stayed in a quiet guesthouse on the edge of the desert, and had a great rooftop view of the dawn hot air balloons.

-Peter