Temple of Luxor

Introduction

If Karnak was religious Thebes at its fullest, Luxor Temple is where it was finished: far smaller, but open after dark, which makes it the only great pharaonic temple in Egypt you can comfortably visit at night. Its core is a colonnade of fourteen papyrus-bundle columns, about 19 metres tall and nearly 3 metres in diameter, with the tied-bud capitals carved in detail. This is not decoration but a processional route: in the eleventh month of the lunar year the barques of Amun, Mut and Isis travelled from Karnak down the Avenue of Sphinxes and the Nile to arrive here, where the pharaoh made offering. The reliefs on the colonnade walls show that procession, and it leads back to the small sun altar, the oldest part of the site. Luxor Temple was not invented; it is the destination of the Opet route. The first view is Ramesses II's first pylon with an equal pair of seated colossi, and to its right the single surviving granite obelisk, about 25 metres high and long since stripped of gold. Its twin was exchanged to France in 1836 and now stands in the Place de la Concorde in Paris. Through the pylon lies the Court of Ramesses II, on top of which the twelfth-century Mosque of Abu Haggag still functions — a medieval mosque built directly over the ancient courtyard, its minaret rising above the temple walls and still used for Friday prayers. That is not a curiosity piled up for effect but a real section through the layers: the temple was buried, the town grew on it, and modern excavation cut the town away again. Deeper in is the Court of the Sun, where a cache of Amenhotep III statues was found buried in 1989 and now sits in the Luxor Museum — a good reason to do the museum first. The sanctuary of Amenhotep III at the back has lost its roof, leaving the grid of stone beams exposed. In the northwest corner Alexander the Great added a granite shrine in the fourth century BCE, with reliefs showing him as a pharaoh, the best-preserved Macedonian-era addition to any Egyptian temple. Unlike Karnak, this temple rewards two visits: the first two hours after opening, when raking light picks out the colonnade reliefs, and after sunset, when warm floodlights change the mood completely. From a Nile felucca you can see the lit silhouette of the temple from the opposite bank. Both visits are covered by the same ticket.

✨ Highlights

🛈 Practical Info