Luxor and the Valley of the Kings: Egypt's Eternal City and the House of Eternity

There is no place on earth quite like Luxor. Sprawling across both banks of the Nile in Upper Egypt, this city of roughly half a million modern inhabitants sits atop what was once the greatest metropolis of the ancient world, the city the Egyptians called Waset and the Greeks called Thebes, a name that echoed down through Western culture as a synonym for wealth, grandeur, and the glittering ambitions of a civilization that built on a scale no subsequent people ever quite matched. The monuments that survive at Luxor, still standing after three thousand years, are the largest and most spectacular religious and funerary monuments ever constructed. The Karnak temple complex alone covers more than two hundred acres and was built, added to, and rebuilt by thirty successive pharaohs over two thousand years, making it not just a building but a living geological record of Egyptian civilization in stone. On the west bank of the Nile, in a barren limestone valley chosen by the ancients as the proper place to hide the bodies of their god-kings, lie the tombs of the pharaohs of the New Kingdom, cut deep into the rock and decorated with some of the most extraordinary painting and carved relief in the history of human art.

For any traveler who has stood at sunrise before the Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak, watching the light inch up the 21-meter columns and pick out the color still clinging to their carved surfaces, or descended into the tomb of Seti I as the ancient paintings reveal themselves in their extraordinary detail and delicacy in the beam of a flashlight, or crouched through the small opening into the antechamber of Tutankhamun's tomb in the Valley of the Kings and felt the weight of the three thousand years since Howard Carter first forced it open, the experience of Luxor is transformative. It is one of those rare places where history stops being an abstraction and becomes immediate and physical, where the ancient world does not feel so much past as temporarily absent, as if the priests and scribes and tomb-painters have only just gone home.

This article attempts to do justice to the full scope of what Luxor offers the visitor and the student of history. It covers the ancient city of Thebes and its role in the New Kingdom, the East Bank temples of Karnak and Luxor, the West Bank monuments including the Valley of the Kings and its extraordinary tombs, the village of the tomb builders at Deir el-Medina, the great story of the royal mummies and their rediscovery, Howard Carter's epochal 1922 discovery, and the challenges and triumphs of managing one of the world's most important archaeological heritage zones in the modern era.

Geography and the Nile

Luxor lies on the east bank of the Nile River in Upper Egypt, approximately 650 kilometers south of Cairo and approximately 300 kilometers north of Aswan. Upper Egypt is "upper" in the sense of upstream, and despite the apparent paradox this is in the south: the Nile flows from south to north, so its upper reaches are in the south and its lower reaches are in the north, near the Mediterranean. At Luxor, the Nile flows roughly north-northeast, and the city sits in the bend of the river just before it turns more directly northward.

The Nile Valley at Luxor is narrow by Egyptian standards. The fertile agricultural strip on both sides of the river is bounded fairly quickly by the desert plateau, particularly on the west bank, where the limestone escarpment rises abruptly from the flood plain to create a dramatic visual contrast between the green ribbon of cultivation along the river and the pale yellow rock of the hills behind it. It is in this western limestone massif, just behind the thin strip of cultivation on the west bank, that the Valley of the Kings, the Valley of the Queens, and the other tombs of the Theban necropolis are cut.

The geography of Luxor was central to its significance in ancient times. The Nile itself, the source of all agricultural life in Egypt, flowed past the city's doorstep, and the annual inundation that deposited the rich silt that made Egyptian agriculture possible was both a physical reality and a religious metaphor. The east bank, where the sun rose, was the land of the living; the west bank, where the sun set, was the land of the dead. This symbolic geography was not merely a poetic conceit but a practical organizing principle of the ancient city: the living built their homes, temples, and palaces on the east bank, while the dead were buried on the west. The greatest mortuary complex in the ancient world accordingly sprawled across the west bank limestone hills, while the great temples of the gods occupied the east bank.

Ancient Thebes: Waset and the City of Amun

The ancient city that occupied the site of modern Luxor was known to the Egyptians as Waset, a name that carried connotations of dominion and supremacy. In religious texts and royal propaganda it was called No-Amun, meaning "the city of Amun," emphasizing the special relationship between the city and Amun, the chief deity of the Theban theological tradition who rose during the Middle and New Kingdom periods to become effectively the national god of Egypt. Homer, in the Iliad, mentioned "hundred-gated Thebes" as a byword for wealth, and it was the Greek name Thebes (derived from a misreading or reshaping of the Egyptian name) that entered the Western historical tradition.

Thebes's rise to importance began in the First Intermediate Period (c. 2181–2055 BCE), when the centralized Old Kingdom state collapsed and regional power centers emerged across Egypt. The rulers of the Eleventh Dynasty, based at Thebes, eventually reunited Egypt under their leadership, founding the Middle Kingdom. Thebes became the royal capital during this period and the seat of the increasingly powerful Amun priesthood. When the Hyksos, a people from the Levant, conquered and ruled northern Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period (c. 1650–1550 BCE), it was again the rulers of Thebes who led the resistance and eventually expelled them, founding the Eighteenth Dynasty and inaugurating the New Kingdom.

The New Kingdom (c. 1550–1069 BCE) was the period of Egypt's greatest imperial power, and Thebes was its religious heart if not always its administrative center. The pharaohs of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Dynasties built at Thebes on a scale that no subsequent rulers ever attempted. The incomprehensible accumulation of stone, art, gold, and human labor that went into the monuments at Thebes represents the maximum point of Egyptian civilization's material expression. Even when the administrative capital was at Memphis in the north (as it often was, because Memphis was more centrally located for the governance of the whole kingdom), Thebes remained the religious capital, the place where the most important festivals were celebrated, the gods were most properly honored, and the pharaohs were buried. It was the spiritual center of the Egyptian world.

The New Kingdom and the Golden Age of Thebes

The New Kingdom pharaohs who built Thebes into the monumental city we know archaeologically today were some of the most powerful and consequential rulers in the history of the ancient world. Thutmose I (r. c. 1504–1492 BCE) extended Egypt's boundaries to the Euphrates in the north and into the heart of Nubia in the south, creating an empire of extraordinary scope, and began the tradition of cutting royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings rather than building pyramids. His daughter Hatshepsut (r. c. 1473–1458 BCE) was one of Egypt's most successful rulers, conducting major trade expeditions to the land of Punt and building her magnificent mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri. Thutmose III (r. c. 1458–1425 BCE), often called the "Napoleon of ancient Egypt," conducted seventeen campaigns in the Levant and created the most territorially extensive Egyptian empire. Amenhotep III (r. c. 1386–1353 BCE) built on such a scale that ancient writers marveled at his achievements, and the Colossi of Memnon are the surviving remnants of what was once the largest mortuary temple in Egypt. Ramesses II (r. c. 1279–1213 BCE), the most prolific builder in Egyptian history, left his mark on virtually every major monument in Egypt and added the Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak to the already existing buildings there.

These pharaohs and their successors drove the construction programs at Karnak and Luxor on the east bank, the Valley of the Kings and the various mortuary temples on the west bank, and the associated religious, administrative, and support infrastructure that made Thebes function as the ceremonial center of an empire. At its height, Thebes was a city of perhaps one hundred thousand people (estimates vary widely), with a complex economy centered on the maintenance of the temples, the support of the tomb-building projects, and the agricultural surplus generated by the rich Nile Valley farmland.

The East Bank: the Land of the Living

The east bank of Luxor is the site of the two great temple complexes that were the religious center of ancient Thebes: Karnak, the vast precinct of the national god Amun-Ra, and Luxor Temple, the "southern sanctuary" to which Amun traveled in the great annual procession of the Opet Festival. Together, these two complexes represent the greatest surviving examples of ancient Egyptian religious architecture, and they have awed and astounded visitors — from ancient tourists scratching their names on the walls to Napoleon's savants, who incorporated them in the Description de l'Egypte, to the millions of modern tourists who pour through them every year — for more than three thousand years.

Karnak: the Greatest Religious Complex Ever Built

Karnak is without qualification the largest religious building ever constructed anywhere in the world. Its full formal name is Ipet-isut, "the most select of places," and the name captures something of the ancient Egyptians' sense of this as the supremely sacred site on earth, the place where the gods were most fully present and most properly worshipped. The complex covers approximately 200 acres (about 80 hectares), and the main precinct alone, the Precinct of Amun-Ra, is large enough to contain several of the world's most famous cathedrals simultaneously.

Karnak was not built all at once or even over a single dynasty. It was constructed, added to, modified, expanded, demolished in part and rebuilt, and embellished over a period of approximately 2,000 years, from the Middle Kingdom (around 2000 BCE) through the Ptolemaic period (ending around 30 BCE). This means that virtually every pharaoh of the New Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, Late Period, and Ptolemaic Egypt left some imprint on Karnak, adding a gateway here, a new hall there, an obelisk or a statue or a series of decorated walls. The result is not a coherent architectural plan but a magnificent accumulation, a geological accretion of stone and meaning in which each layer represents a different dynasty, a different political moment, a different theological emphasis.

At the heart of Karnak is the Great Temple of Amun-Ra, the primary cult temple of the national god. This temple is entered from the west through a series of monumental gateways called pylons, ten of which still stand in various states of preservation, each representing a different phase of construction. The outermost pylon (the first, by Egyptian convention, meaning the one closest to the entrance) is the largest but also the most incompletely built: it was begun in the 30th Dynasty but never finished, and its towers still stand at unequal heights as a permanent reminder that even the most ambitious projects can be interrupted. Moving inward through the pylons is a journey backward through Egyptian history, as each pylon represents an earlier construction phase.

The complex also contains several sacred lakes, subsidiary temples, storage magazines, workshops, schools, and residences for the priestly staff. The primary sacred lake, at the south end of the Precinct of Amun-Ra, measures 120 meters by 77 meters and was used for ritual ablutions, for the movement of sacred barques in nocturnal ceremonies, and for the keeping of sacred geese dedicated to Amun. On the lake's northwestern corner stands a large stone scarab beetle, dedicated by Amenhotep III, which was believed to bring good luck to those who walked around it — and modern tourists duly circle it in counterclockwise direction as directed by their guides.

Karnak also contains the Precinct of Mut, the consort of Amun and one of the great mother goddesses of the Egyptian pantheon, and the smaller Precinct of Montu, the war god who was the earliest chief deity of the Theban region before Amun superseded him. The Precinct of Mut, south of the main Amun precinct, contains its own sacred lake (Lake Isheru, shaped like a horseshoe) and is famous for the hundreds of black granite statues of the lion-headed goddess Sekhmet that were erected there by Amenhotep III, many of which still stand in various degrees of preservation.

The Great Hypostyle Hall

The Great Hypostyle Hall of Karnak is one of the most magnificent architectural achievements of the ancient world and the most spectacular single room ever built in Egypt. It stands between the second and third pylons of the Amun precinct, and it was built primarily during the reigns of Seti I (r. c. 1294–1279 BCE) and his son Ramesses II (r. c. 1279–1213 BCE), the two greatest builders of the Nineteenth Dynasty.

The Hypostyle Hall is not a large hall by the standards of modern architecture. Its dimensions are impressive but not extraordinary: it measures approximately 102 meters wide and 53 meters deep, covering an area of roughly 5,400 square meters. What makes it extraordinary is not its floor area but its forest of columns, and the relationship between those columns and the human beings who move among them. The hall contains 134 columns in 16 rows. The 12 central columns along the main axis are the largest, standing 21 meters (roughly 69 feet) tall and 3.5 meters (about 11.5 feet) in diameter at the base. The remaining 122 columns are smaller, standing approximately 14 meters tall but still dwarfing human visitors with their sheer mass.

Every surface of the columns, walls, and ceiling of the Hypostyle Hall was originally covered with carved relief and paint. The reliefs on the columns and walls record the religious ceremonies, royal victories, and mythological narratives that constituted the official theology and political ideology of the Nineteenth Dynasty pharaohs. The southern outer wall of the Hypostyle Hall bears reliefs of Ramesses II in the Battle of Kadesh (c. 1274 BCE), his great engagement with the Hittite king Muwatalli II that was one of the largest chariot battles in history and that Ramesses subsequently presented as a personal triumph in propaganda texts and images carved at monuments across Egypt. The northern outer wall bears battle reliefs of Seti I showing his campaigns in Canaan and Libya.

The columns of the Hypostyle Hall were originally painted in brilliant polychrome. Traces of the original paint still survive in protected areas — the reds, blues, greens, and yellows that covered every carved surface, making the hall in its original state not the pale stone landscape visitors see today but a riot of color, gilded and bright, reflecting the light of oil lamps and the offerings of incense that would have filled the space during ceremonies. Several ancient tourists scratched their names on the columns: the practice of visiting Karnak and leaving one's name appears to have been as established among ancient Egyptians as it is among modern tourists.

The lighting conditions in the Hypostyle Hall were deliberately controlled by the ancient architects. The central nave, lined with the taller papyrus-bundle columns, was slightly higher than the flanking aisles, and a series of clerestory windows allowed light to filter down into the hall from above. The effect, even today when the windows are no longer intact, is of a graduated luminosity that would have been even more dramatic in the original painted and lamp-lit hall, with the central axis relatively bright and the side aisles progressively dimmer, directing the worshipper's attention toward the inner sanctuary.

The Sacred Lake and the Monument of Taharqa

The sacred lake of Karnak, immediately south of the Hypostyle Hall, was excavated and lined with stone during the reign of Thutmose III. It measures 120 by 77 meters and was used for religious purposes including the ritual bathing of priests before ceremonies, the floating of sacred barques carrying divine statues, and the keeping of sacred water birds. The lake also contained fish sacred to Amun and was maintained by a permanent staff of priests.

Near the sacred lake stands one of the more unusual structures at Karnak: the Festival Hall of Thutmose III, also called the Akh-menu, built in the form of a tent with unusual flower-shaped columns that are quite different from the standard Egyptian column forms and may reflect influence from the foreign lands Thutmose III had conquered. The hall contains a "Botanical Garden" room with reliefs of plants and animals brought back from the pharaoh's Syrian campaigns, a remarkable catalogue of the flora and fauna of the Levantine world as an ancient Egyptian artist understood it.

Rising in the vicinity of the great sanctuary is the Kiosk of Taharqa, a Nubian pharaoh of the 25th Dynasty (r. c. 690–664 BCE), which was once a large pavilion but now consists of a single surviving column, the tallest column in all of Karnak at 21 meters, which gives some sense of what the complete pavilion would have looked like.

The Avenue of Sphinxes and the Opet Festival

One of the most dramatic recent developments at Luxor has been the complete excavation and opening to the public of the Avenue of Sphinxes, the ceremonial processional road that connected Karnak Temple to Luxor Temple 2.7 kilometers to the south. Long known from ancient sources and visible in parts along its length, the avenue was subject to a major excavation project that was completed and the restored road opened to the public in 2021, creating what is now a remarkable walkway through the ancient city.

The Avenue of Sphinxes is flanked on both sides by approximately 1,350 sphinx figures, most of them ram-headed sphinxes (the ram being sacred to Amun) for the portion near Karnak, transitioning to human-headed sphinxes for the section near Luxor Temple. The sphinxes were placed at intervals of a few meters along the full 2.7-kilometer length, creating an imposing corridor of stone guardians along the processional route. Many of the sphinxes still bear the cartouches of the pharaohs who erected them, providing a record of the various building campaigns that extended and maintained the avenue over many centuries.

The primary occasion for which the Avenue of Sphinxes served as the processional route was the Opet Festival, one of the most important religious celebrations of the ancient Egyptian calendar. The Opet Festival was celebrated annually in the second month of the Nile's inundation (roughly September by modern reckoning) and lasted for approximately 27 days in its New Kingdom peak. The central act of the festival was the ceremonial transfer of the divine statue of Amun from Karnak to Luxor Temple, where it was reunited with the Luxor form of Amun and the divine power of the pharaoh was renewed through a series of rituals conducted in the innermost sanctuary.

During the Opet Festival, the divine statue of Amun was removed from its shrine in the innermost sanctuary at Karnak, placed in a sacred barque (a boat-shaped portable shrine), and carried either overland along the Avenue of Sphinxes or by river on a royal ceremonial vessel to Luxor Temple, accompanied by the pharaoh, the priestly hierarchy, and crowds of celebrating Egyptians. After the rituals at Luxor, Amun returned to Karnak, again either overland or by river. The festival was a major occasion for public celebration, with music, dancing, feasting, and the distribution of food and drink to the populace by the temples. The reliefs on the walls of Luxor Temple record the Opet Festival procession in great detail, showing the barques, the attendants, and the festive crowds.

Luxor Temple: the Southern Sanctuary

Luxor Temple stands on the east bank of the Nile at the heart of the modern city, its entrance pylon rising immediately adjacent to the modern corniche road along the riverfront, in a juxtaposition of ancient grandeur and modern urban life that is one of the defining experiences of visiting Luxor. Unlike Karnak, which was built over millennia by many different pharaohs in an additive, sometimes chaotic way, Luxor Temple has a greater unity of design, its core being built primarily by two pharaohs: Amenhotep III (r. c. 1386–1353 BCE), who built the inner colonnaded hall and the sanctuary complex, and Ramesses II (r. c. 1279–1213 BCE), who built the outer court, the pylon entrance, and the colossal statues that still frame the approach.

The temple's formal name was Ipet-resyt, "the southern sanctuary," reflecting its relationship to Karnak (Ipet-isut) to the north. Its theological purpose was specific: it was the place where the divine kingship was renewed, where the pharaoh's identification with the divine was ritually enacted, and where Amun in his form as a generative and creative deity met with the royal spirit. The innermost sanctuary of Luxor Temple was not a public space but a place of extreme ritual restriction, entered only by the highest priests and the pharaoh himself during the most sacred moments of the Opet Festival.

The outer court of Ramesses II, entered through the massive first pylon, is one of the grandest open spaces in Egyptian architecture. The pylon itself bore scenes of the Battle of Kadesh and the text of the treaty between Ramesses II and the Hittite king Hattusili III (the earliest known peace treaty in the world). Before the pylon stand two colossal seated statues of Ramesses II, each originally about 14 meters tall, and between them rise the bases of what were originally two obelisks. One obelisk, 25 meters tall and covered with hieroglyphic inscriptions recording the deeds of Ramesses II, still stands in front of the temple and remains one of the most impressive ancient monuments in Luxor. The other obelisk was given by Muhammad Ali Pasha to the French government in 1830, shipped to France with considerable difficulty, and now stands in the Place de la Concorde in Paris, where it has been since 1836 — one of the most prominent ancient Egyptian monuments in Europe.

The Colonnade of Amenhotep III, the great hall of fourteen pairs of 16-meter-tall papyrus-bundle columns leading from the outer court into the inner sanctuary complex, was decorated with the reliefs of the Opet Festival during the reign of Tutankhamun. These reliefs, among the most vibrant and detailed in all of Egyptian art, show the procession of the divine barques, the crowds of participants, the musicians and dancers, and the festive atmosphere of the celebration. They are a primary source for understanding the Opet Festival's visual and processional character.

The innermost sanctuaries of Luxor Temple, built by Amenhotep III, contain some of the most unusual features in Egyptian religious architecture. The innermost room contains the granite naos (the shrine that housed the divine statue), and the surrounding rooms bear the reliefs of the divine birth of Amenhotep III, in which the god Amun is shown taking on the form of Amenhotep III's earthly father and fathering the pharaoh, providing a mythological basis for the ruler's divine nature. This divine birth narrative is one of the most important texts for understanding Pharaonic theology.

A fascinating historical footnote at Luxor Temple is the mosque of Abu Haggag, a medieval Islamic saint, which stands within the temple precinct and was built when the temple was still buried under the accumulated debris of centuries and the existing village grew up over it. When the temple was excavated in the 19th century, the mosque was found to be standing on a platform that sat on the ancient columns, and rather than demolish it, archaeologists preserved it in place. The mosque is still an active place of worship today and holds an annual moulid (religious festival) that echoes in some ways the ancient processional festivals of the temple beneath it.

The West Bank: the Land of the Dead

Crossing the Nile to the west bank of Luxor is crossing a symbolic threshold that the ancient Egyptians themselves recognized as profound. The east bank, where the sun rose, was the land of the living, of the city, of commerce and worship and daily life. The west bank, where the sun set into the desert horizon, was the land of the dead, of tombs and mortuary temples, of the afterlife and the underworld. The god who ruled the west bank was Osiris, the lord of the dead and the king of the underworld, and the goddess who presided over the western cliffs was Meretseger, "she who loves silence," the cobra goddess who lived in the pyramid-shaped peak al-Qurn that rises above the Valley of the Kings.

The west bank of modern Luxor is still an area of villages, farmland, and archaeological sites, less urbanized than the east bank. From the west bank waterfront, the land rises gently across the cultivation until it meets the limestone escarpment that marks the beginning of the desert plateau. Mortuary temples, the great cult establishments maintained in honor of dead pharaohs, line the cultivation edge of the west bank from north to south: the temple of Seti I at Gurna, the Ramesseum (the mortuary temple of Ramesses II), Medinet Habu (the mortuary temple of Ramesses III), and many others, now mostly ruined but still impressive. Behind these temples, the land rises into the low limestone hills of the necropolis, where tombs of nobles, officials, and craftsmen are cut. And further back, through a narrow pass in the limestone ridge, the visitor enters the Valley of the Kings.

The Colossi of Memnon and the Mortuary Temple of Amenhotep III

The Colossi of Memnon are the most immediately visible monuments on the west bank. They stand in the open cultivation plain, visible from a great distance, their massive forms rising above the flat farmland like sentinels guarding the approach to the necropolis beyond. The two colossi are seated figures of Amenhotep III, each standing approximately 18 meters tall and weighing approximately 720 tons, carved from single blocks of quartzite sandstone quarried near modern Cairo and transported about 700 kilometers south to Thebes — a logistical feat of extraordinary ambition.

In their original context, the Colossi of Memnon did not stand alone in the open fields. They were the gateway figures to what was once the largest and most elaborate mortuary temple in the history of Egypt, the memorial complex of Amenhotep III that stretched behind them over an area of roughly 86 acres. This temple complex, built with a profligacy of resources and a grandeur of scale that even Ramesses II's subsequent efforts could not fully surpass, has been almost entirely destroyed over the centuries — its blocks quarried for other buildings, its foundations eroded by the Nile flood, its statues and decorated surfaces scattered across collections worldwide. The Colossi are what remain of what was once a monument of staggering splendor.

The name "Colossi of Memnon" is Greek and refers to the hero Memnon of Ethiopian origin who fought and was killed at Troy in Greek mythology. The Greeks and Romans who visited the site during the classical period believed the statues depicted Memnon, and the site became a celebrated destination for ancient tourists, who left graffiti on the feet and legs of the statues recording their visits — a corpus of inscriptions that constitutes a valuable historical record of tourism in the ancient world.

The Singing Memnon: a Phenomenon and Its History

The ancient tourist attraction that made the Colossi of Memnon particularly famous was the "singing" of one of the statues — specifically the northern colossus — which was heard to emit a musical tone at certain times, particularly at sunrise. This phenomenon was widely reported by ancient travelers and was attributed by the Greeks and Romans to the hero Memnon "greeting" his mother, Eos, the goddess of the dawn.

The scientific explanation for the singing Memnon, established by modern investigation, relates to the earthquake damage the northern colossus suffered, probably in 27 BCE. The earthquake cracked the upper portion of the statue, and when the sun's rays heated the stone after the cold of the desert night, the expansion of the damaged stone created a resonance effect that produced the reported musical sound. The phenomenon was sufficiently consistent and sufficiently unusual to attract visitors from across the Roman world, including the emperors Hadrian and Septimius Severus. Septimius Severus, visiting in 199 CE, was apparently anxious to hear the phenomenon himself. When the statue failed to sing on his first visit, he ordered it repaired, filling the crack in the stone. After the repair, the singing stopped — the structural damage that had created the resonance was sealed. The northern colossus has been silent ever since.

The phenomenon of the singing Memnon illustrates the extent to which the monuments of the Theban west bank served as tourist attractions even in antiquity. The Roman period graffiti on the colossi, recording visits by governors, soldiers, philosophers, and travelers from across the Mediterranean world, show that pilgrimage to the ancient monuments of Thebes was a recognized activity, and that even in a period when the monuments were already 1,000 to 1,500 years old, their significance and their magnetic attraction for visitors was well established.

Hatshepsut's Mortuary Temple at Deir El-Bahri

At the northern end of the west bank necropolis, where the limestone cliffs of the Theban massif form a dramatic amphitheater, stands one of the most elegant and architecturally striking buildings of ancient Egypt: the mortuary temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahri, known in ancient Egyptian as Djeser-Djeseru, "the Sublime of Sublimes." Built in the early 15th century BCE during Hatshepsut's reign, and designed by her royal architect Senenmut, the temple is unique in Egyptian architecture for its colonnaded terraces set against the cliff face, creating a composition of horizontal human-made forms against the vertical natural rock that is as impressive in modern eyes as it was in ancient ones.

The temple is constructed on three levels, each consisting of a broad terrace with colonnades on its front face, connected by ramps that ascend from the lower level to the middle and from the middle to the upper. The lowest level was originally a garden planted with myrrh trees brought from the land of Punt — one of the most celebrated trading expeditions of the New Kingdom — whose roots, long dead, were found in pits by archaeologists. The middle level contains the Punt colonnade, with relief sculptures recording the details of the expedition: the Egyptian boats arriving in the land of Punt, the exchange of goods, the exotic plants and animals encountered, and the figure of the obese queen of Punt. The upper level contains the main sanctuary of Amun, the solar chapel, and the inner rooms that constituted the core of the temple's ritual function.

Hatshepsut's reliefs and images throughout the temple were systematically defaced after her death, almost certainly on the orders of her successor Thutmose III. Wherever her image appeared — in formal reliefs, in name cartouches, in statuary — her face was chiseled out and in many cases her name was erased and replaced with that of her husband Thutmose II or her stepson Thutmose III. The motive for this erasure is debated by Egyptologists. The traditional interpretation, that Thutmose III resented Hatshepsut's regency and sought to erase her from history in revenge, has been complicated by the observation that the defacement appears to have been carried out systematically rather than with the urgency of personal hatred, and that it may have been motivated primarily by theological concerns about the succession narrative rather than by personal animus. Whatever the motive, the erasure of Hatshepsut was sufficiently thorough that until the late 19th century her identity was unknown to Egyptologists, who read the masculine pronouns and formal titles in her inscriptions and assumed they were dealing with a male king.

The mortuary temple of Hatshepsut is today one of the most visited sites on the Luxor west bank and has been the subject of extensive Polish-Egyptian conservation and reconstruction work since the 1960s through the Polish Center of Mediterranean Archaeology. It is also, grimly, the site of one of the worst terrorist attacks in modern Egyptian history: in November 1997, Islamic extremists attacked tourists at the temple, killing 62 people, 58 of them foreign tourists. The attack devastated Egyptian tourism for several years and resulted in major security upgrades across all archaeological sites in Egypt.

The Valley of the Kings: Location, Geography, and Sacred Significance

The Valley of the Kings, known in Arabic as Wadi el-Muluk and in ancient Egyptian as the Great and Noble Necropolis of the Millions of Years of the Pharaoh, is a barren limestone wadi (dry riverbed valley) located approximately two kilometers west of the cultivated strip of the Nile west bank, accessible through a narrow pass in the limestone ridge that forms the first barrier between the cultivation and the desert plateau.

The valley is divided into two branches. The East Valley (the main valley) contains the great majority of the royal tombs and all of the most famous ones. The West Valley, also called the Valley of the Monkeys, is less visited and contains fewer tombs, including KV22 (the tomb of Amenhotep III) and KV23 (the tomb of Ay, Tutankhamun's immediate successor).

The landscape of the main valley is startling in its stark desolation. The visitor enters through a narrow ravine that opens into a broad, pale limestone bowl surrounded on three sides by steep cliffs. The floor of the valley is of packed limestone gravel and rubble, gleaming white under the intense Egyptian sun. There is no shade, no vegetation, no water, nothing but rock and sky and the narrow black rectangular openings of the tomb entrances cut into the valley floor and the surrounding cliff faces. The heat in summer is ferocious. The silence is complete.

Rising above the southern end of the main valley is the natural pyramid-shaped limestone peak called al-Qurn, "the horn," which reaches an elevation of about 420 meters above the valley floor. This peak, with its uncanny resemblance to a pyramid, was central to the Valley of the Kings' sacred geography. The ancient Egyptians believed that al-Qurn was inhabited by the cobra goddess Meretseger, "she who loves silence," a deity of the necropolis who both protected the royal dead and punished those who violated the sanctity of the tombs. The pyramid form itself linked al-Qurn to the solar theology of resurrection, since the pyramid was associated with the primordial hill of creation and with the rays of the sun descending to earth.

The Transition from Pyramid to Rock-Cut Tomb

The Valley of the Kings became the royal burial ground beginning with Thutmose I (r. c. 1504–1492 BCE) and continued in use through the end of the New Kingdom (c. 1069 BCE), encompassing the burials of the great pharaohs of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Dynasties. The choice to abandon the pyramid as the standard form of royal burial — the form that had dominated Egyptian royal funerary practice for more than a thousand years — in favor of rock-cut tombs hidden in a remote desert valley represents one of the most significant shifts in the history of Egyptian funerary practice.

The primary practical reason for the change was the catastrophic failure of the pyramid as a protection for the royal burial. By the end of the Middle Kingdom, it was abundantly clear that pyramids, for all their grandeur, did not protect their contents. The pyramids of the Old and Middle Kingdom pharaohs had been robbed in antiquity, their sarcophagi broken open and their mummies desecrated. The pyramid form, by its very nature, announced the location of the royal burial and made it accessible to thieves. A hidden tomb, by contrast, would deny robbers the ability to find it.

The additional theological reasoning behind the valley location appears in royal inscriptions. The pyramid-shaped peak of al-Qurn performed the symbolic function of the pyramid — associating the burial with solar resurrection theology — while the actual tomb was concealed. The valley's isolation also facilitated security: it was easy to guard a single narrow entrance against intruders. The workmen who built and decorated the tombs lived in a walled village, Deir el-Medina, on the other side of the ridge, and the valley itself was patrolled by guards.

The Geology and Sacred Landscape of the Valley

The geology of the Valley of the Kings is one of the most important factors in the preservation of its tombs and also one of the most significant challenges for their long-term conservation. The limestone of the Theban massif is generally a good medium for rock-cutting, being relatively soft and consistent in texture, which made it possible for ancient craftsmen to cut the long corridors and chambers of the royal tombs using copper and bronze tools. However, the limestone also contains layers of shale and other less consistent materials that can be unstable, and the valley is subject to occasional flash floods of extreme violence when rare desert rainstorms send torrents of water rushing through the narrow gorge.

These flash floods have been a recurring problem throughout the valley's history, both ancient and modern. Several tombs have suffered severe damage from flood water that deposited layers of gravel and limestone chips several meters deep over the tomb entrances and, in some cases, poured into the tomb corridors and chambers, destroying their decorated walls and damaging their contents. The flooding is one of the primary ongoing conservation challenges for the valley's management.

The choice of the valley's orientation also reflected careful observation of the local geology. The main valley is aligned roughly east-west, so that the rising sun illuminates the valley each morning from the east, creating the appropriate solar symbolism for a place of resurrection. The tomb entrances in the valley floor and the lower cliff faces were positioned to maximize the concealment of the tomb openings in the general confusion of pale limestone surfaces, making them difficult to spot even from a short distance.

The Tombs in Detail: the Royal Burials of the New Kingdom

The Valley of the Kings contains 63 numbered tombs (designated KV1 through KV63, with additional tombs discovered since the numbering system was established) ranging from modest single-chamber pits to vast multi-corridor complexes hundreds of meters long. Not all of these tombs belong to royalty: several are the burials of queens, royal children, and court officials who were permitted to be interred in proximity to the royal dead. The great royal tombs, the burials of the pharaohs themselves, are the largest, most elaborately decorated, and most famous.

The decorative program of the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings evolved significantly over the course of the New Kingdom. The earliest tombs, from the Eighteenth Dynasty, tend to have relatively simple painted decorations drawn in a cursive style, almost like enlarged illustrations from papyrus manuscripts, depicting the texts of the Amduat (the "What Is in the Underworld"), the Book of the Gates, and other funerary texts that guided the royal soul through the twelve hours of the night and the dangers of the underworld. Later tombs, especially from the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties, have more elaborate relief carvings painted in brilliant colors, covering every surface of every corridor and chamber with a comprehensive theological program that transformed the tomb into a microcosm of the underworld itself.

Kv62: the Tomb of Tutankhamun

The most famous tomb in the Valley of the Kings, and indeed one of the most famous archaeological sites in the world, is KV62, the tomb of the young pharaoh Tutankhamun (r. c. 1332–1323 BCE). Tutankhamun was a relatively minor king by the standards of the New Kingdom, dying at approximately 18 years of age after a reign of about ten years, having come to the throne as a child during the turbulent aftermath of the Amarna period. His fame rests not on his achievements during his lifetime but on the extraordinary preservation of his tomb, which was discovered by Howard Carter in 1922 virtually intact, its contents undisturbed (apart from two minor ancient robberies, from which the thieves appear to have been caught and the tomb resealed) for more than three thousand years.

The tomb of Tutankhamun is actually one of the smallest in the Valley of the Kings, a fact that is itself historically significant: scholars believe the tomb was originally not intended for a king at all, but for a high official or noble, and was appropriated for Tutankhamun's burial when he died unexpectedly before a properly royal tomb had been completed. Its small size — four rooms in total — is inconsistent with the elaborate multi-corridor complexes that characterize the tombs of major pharaohs, and the paintings in the burial chamber are in a more casual style than those of the great Nineteenth Dynasty tombs, as if they were executed rapidly by a smaller team working under time pressure.

Despite its small size, the tomb contained more than 5,000 individual objects when Carter opened it, representing the most complete royal burial assemblage ever found in Egypt and one of the greatest art historical discoveries of the 20th century. The golden burial mask of Tutankhamun, now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo (and to be moved to the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza), is the most famous single object from ancient Egypt and one of the most recognized images in the world: the serene golden face with its striped nemes headdress and cobra and vulture uraeus, the eyes lined with lapis lazuli, has become the defining visual symbol of ancient Egyptian civilization.

Kv7: the Tomb of Ramesses II

The tomb of Ramesses II, designated KV7, is one of the largest in the Valley of the Kings, measuring approximately 160 meters from entrance to innermost chamber and containing numerous side rooms and annexes. Ramesses II (r. c. 1279–1213 BCE) was Egypt's most prolific builder and one of its longest-reigning pharaohs, and his tomb befits his monumental self-image.

Unfortunately, KV7 is also one of the most severely damaged tombs in the valley. The tomb has suffered catastrophically from flash flooding over the centuries, and the massive deposits of debris that have repeatedly filled its corridors have caused severe damage to the decorated walls and ceilings. Many of the relief carvings that once made it one of the most elaborately decorated tombs in the valley have been lost or heavily damaged by the repeated ingress of water and the movement of tonnes of gravel and limestone debris that accompanied each flood. The mummy of Ramesses II was found not in this tomb, which had been robbed in antiquity, but in the Deir el-Bahari royal cache where it had been deposited for safekeeping by priests of the 21st Dynasty. His mummy, a dramatically preserved figure with a noble profile and red-blond hair (probably dyed with henna), is now in the Cairo Museum and can still be viewed today.

Kv17: the Tomb of Seti I

The tomb of Seti I, designated KV17, is widely regarded as the most beautifully decorated tomb in the Valley of the Kings, and many scholars consider it the finest surviving example of ancient Egyptian funerary art. Seti I (r. c. 1294–1279 BCE), the father of Ramesses II, was one of the most accomplished rulers of the Nineteenth Dynasty, conducting major military campaigns in the Levant and initiating a sweeping program of temple construction and decoration. His tomb reflects the artistic standards of his reign, which represent a high point of Egyptian relief sculpture and painting.

KV17 is one of the longest tombs in the valley, with the main axis extending approximately 100 meters from the entrance to the burial chamber (with additional passages beyond), descending through a series of corridors and halls that are entirely covered with elaborately painted relief carvings of exceptional quality. The texts depicted include virtually the entire corpus of New Kingdom funerary literature: the Amduat, the Book of Gates, the Book of the Celestial Cow, the Litany of Ra, and many other texts, all rendered with extraordinary precision and artistry. The colors — the deep blues, rich ochres, brilliant whites, and vivid greens that cover every surface — are remarkably well preserved because the tomb's remoter chambers were sealed under several meters of debris until the modern period.

The burial chamber of Seti I is architecturally distinctive: its ceiling is painted with an astronomical chart depicting the northern constellations and the decans (star groups used for timekeeping), one of the earliest such astronomical ceiling paintings in Egypt. The ceiling transforms the burial chamber into a symbolic sky, making the deceased pharaoh's resting place a microcosm of the cosmos.

KV17 was discovered on October 16, 1817, by the Italian explorer and strongman Giovanni Battista Belzoni, one of the most colorful and controversial figures in the early history of Egyptian archaeology. Belzoni, a former circus performer turned engineer turned treasure hunter, was working on behalf of the British consul Henry Salt when he found the tomb. He entered the decorated corridors and later described the overwhelming impact of the paintings, still fresh after three thousand years. He removed the magnificent alabaster (actually aragonite) sarcophagus of Seti I, a masterpiece of stone carving covered with incised figures from the Book of Gates filled with blue pigment, which he subsequently attempted to sell to the British Museum. The British Museum declined to purchase it at Belzoni's asking price of 2,000 pounds, and the sarcophagus was acquired instead by Sir John Soane, the architect, who purchased it for his personal museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields, London, where it remains today in the Soane Museum as one of the most spectacular ancient objects in any private collection turned public museum. The mummy of Seti I, removed from the tomb in antiquity and eventually deposited in the Deir el-Bahari cache, is in the Cairo Museum and is considered one of the best-preserved royal mummies in existence.

Kv11: the Tomb of Ramesses III

KV11, the tomb of Ramesses III (r. c. 1186–1155 BCE), is one of the most distinctive and in some ways most unusual tombs in the valley. It holds the distinction of being the longest tomb in the Valley of the Kings, extending approximately 188 meters from entrance to the innermost chamber, a length achieved in part through an accident of construction: the original axis of the tomb was shifted when the workers broke through into an earlier tomb (KV10, the tomb of Amenmesse), requiring them to redirect the corridor at an angle to avoid the existing tomb.

The tomb of Ramesses III is famous among Egyptologists for its unusual side chambers, which are decorated with scenes that are entirely atypical of royal tomb decoration. Where most royal tombs show scenes from funerary texts, mythological narratives, and religious ceremonies, the side chambers of KV11 show remarkably mundane subjects: a series of chambers show "butchers" preparing meat, the killing and dressing of various animals, storage jars and provisions, boats and sailors, musicians, and scenes of everyday palace life. These scenes are thought to represent the provisions and activities of the palace that the deceased king would enjoy in the afterlife, a more literal version of the food offerings that typically accompanied Egyptian burials. The "butchers' chambers" and "boats" chambers are unique in the Valley of the Kings and have made KV11 a perennial favorite among visitors interested in the variety of Egyptian funerary iconography.

Kv6: the Tomb of Ramesses IX

KV6, the tomb of Ramesses IX (r. c. 1129–1111 BCE), is one of the most accessible and most visited tombs in the Valley of the Kings. It stands near the entrance to the main valley, with a broad, open entrance and relatively well-preserved decoration that makes it an excellent introduction to royal tomb iconography for visitors who may not have previous familiarity with the subject. The tomb dates from the Twentieth Dynasty, near the end of the New Kingdom, and the quality of its decoration, while very good, reflects something of the declining resources available to the later Ramesside pharaohs as Egypt's imperial power contracted in the 12th and 11th centuries BCE.

The tomb of Ramesses IX was known and accessible even in antiquity: it appears in the famous papyrus of the tomb inspections conducted in the late 20th Dynasty, and its large opening meant that it was never truly hidden in the way that some of the earlier tombs were. It also provided a refuge for the mummies of other pharaohs during the 21st Dynasty repackaging of the royal dead.

Kv63: the 2005 Discovery

In March 2005, archaeologists from the University of Memphis led by Otto Schaden announced what was described at the time as the most significant discovery in the Valley of the Kings since the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922. Working in the area immediately southwest of KV62, in the zone that Howard Carter had himself investigated in 1908, Schaden's team found a vertical shaft that led to a previously unknown chamber, designated KV63.

The initial hopes that KV63 might be a royal burial — another undisturbed pharaonic tomb — were not fulfilled. The chamber turned out to be not a burial room but an embalming cache: a storage deposit containing seven large wooden coffins (all uninscribed or with inscriptions removed) and approximately 28 large storage jars. The coffins contained mummies, or portions of mummies, along with mummification materials including natron, resins, linen bandages, and other supplies. The deposit appears to have been associated with the mummification process itself rather than with a royal burial.

The discovery of KV63 was nonetheless extremely significant. It demonstrated that even after a century of intensive excavation, the Valley of the Kings was still capable of yielding major new discoveries. It confirmed the presence of previously unknown features in a part of the valley that had been considered thoroughly investigated, and it raised the question of how many other features — storage deposits, minor burials, sealed passages — remained to be found in the valley. Subsequent ground-penetrating radar surveys have identified additional anomalies in the valley floor that have not yet been investigated, suggesting that KV63 was not the last discovery the valley will produce.

The Valley of the Queens and the Tomb of Nefertari

South of the Valley of the Kings, in a separate limestone valley known as the Valley of the Queens (ancient Egyptian: Ta Set Neferu, "The Place of Beauty"), lie the tombs of the queens and royal children of the New Kingdom pharaohs. The Valley of the Queens contains approximately 90 tombs, of which the most famous and most spectacular is QV66, the tomb of Queen Nefertari, the principal wife of Ramesses II and perhaps the most beloved queen of ancient Egypt.

The tomb of Nefertari, which Ramesses II had built for her approximately 1255 BCE, contains what is widely regarded as the most beautifully painted interior of any tomb in Egypt, and among the finest examples of ancient Egyptian mural painting anywhere in the world. Every surface of the tomb's corridors, antechambers, and burial chamber is covered with scenes from the Book of the Dead and other funerary texts, painted in brilliant colors with an artistry and delicacy that is simply astonishing in its freshness and in the quality of its draftsmanship even after three thousand years.

The colors of Nefertari's tomb have been remarkably preserved because the tomb was sealed for most of its history and the local geology, though problematic in some respects, has maintained relatively stable humidity conditions in certain areas. The royal figure of Nefertari herself appears repeatedly throughout the decorations, shown in her characteristic white linen dress and elaborate feathered crown, and the portraits of the queen are among the most recognizable images in all of Egyptian art. Her face, shown in the strict Egyptian profile convention but with individualized features, has a serene beauty that modern viewers find as compelling as ancient ones must have.

The tomb of Nefertari was in severe conservation distress when the Getty Conservation Institute and the Egyptian Antiquities Organization undertook a major conservation project beginning in 1986, completed in 1992. The challenge was extraordinary: salt crystals within the limestone walls were crystallizing and expanding, causing the painted plaster surface to detach from the rock behind it. The conservation team developed specialized techniques for consolidating the plaster and reducing the salt damage, stabilizing the paintings and preparing the tomb for reopening to visitors. The experience accumulated in this project became foundational for subsequent conservation work on painted Egyptian monuments worldwide.

The tomb is today open to very limited numbers of visitors, who pay a substantial premium over the standard Valley of the Queens entry fee, in order to protect the fragile paintings from the humidity generated by human breath and perspiration. Even with these restrictions, ongoing monitoring has shown that visitor-generated humidity remains a significant threat, and the balance between public access and conservation will remain a challenge for the site's management indefinitely.

Deir el-Medina: the Village of the Tomb Builders

On the west side of the ridge that separates the Valley of the Kings from the cultivation on the Nile bank, in a narrow valley of its own, lies one of the most remarkable archaeological sites in Egypt: the village of Deir el-Medina, the settlement built to house the craftsmen and their families who built and decorated the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings.

Deir el-Medina was in continuous use for approximately 450 years, from the founding of the Valley of the Kings tradition under Thutmose I in the early 15th century BCE until the end of the New Kingdom in the late 11th century BCE. During this entire period, a community of specialized craftsmen, organized into what might be described as two gangs (the "right gang" and the "left gang," reflecting the two sides of the tunnel as it was cut), lived in this walled village and devoted their working lives to the construction and decoration of the pharaohs' tombs.

The craftsmen of Deir el-Medina were among the most highly skilled workers in ancient Egypt. They included stone-cutters who cut the corridors through the limestone, plasterers who prepared the surfaces for decoration, draftsmen who laid out the designs, sculptors who carved the relief scenes, and painters who applied the brilliant colors. They received their wages — food rations of emmer wheat and barley, supplemented by fish, water, fuel, and other necessities — from the state, delivered regularly to the village stores by a logistical apparatus that was supposed to ensure uninterrupted supply.

The archaeological evidence for life at Deir el-Medina is extraordinarily rich. Because the community was literate (the craftsmen needed to be able to read the texts they were copying and the administrative documents that governed their work), they left behind a vast archive of written documents on ostraca (potsherds and limestone flakes used as cheap writing material) and papyri. These documents include not only administrative records but personal letters, legal documents, literary compositions, and private notes that give a more intimate view of daily life in ancient Egypt than almost any other source in the archaeological record.

The village itself, enclosed within a mud-brick perimeter wall and densely packed with small houses lining a central street, has been extensively excavated, principally by the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo (IFAO) beginning in the 1920s. The houses, though small by modern standards (typically consisting of four or five rooms), were surprisingly well-appointed, with plaster-coated walls, decorated niches and niches for domestic cult statues, and storage facilities. The evidence of domestic material culture — pottery, textiles, tools, children's toys, cosmetic equipment — provides a three-dimensional portrait of daily life in a skilled craftsmen's community in ancient Egypt.

The craftsmen of Deir el-Medina also built and decorated their own tombs, which form a small necropolis on the hillside above the village. These tombs, built with a care and expertise that reflects the craftsmen's professional skills, are among the most richly decorated private tombs in Egypt. Unlike the official tombs of nobles and officials in the main Theban necropolis, which tend to emphasize the official career and status of the deceased, the Deir el-Medina tombs show a greater variety of religious imagery and a more personal approach to funerary decoration that reflects the craftsmen's intimate knowledge of the theological tradition they served.

The World's First Recorded Strike

Perhaps the most historically remarkable document from Deir el-Medina is the Turin Strike Papyrus, an administrative record that describes the events of the 29th year of the reign of Ramesses III (approximately 1158 BCE), when the craftsmen of the royal necropolis went on strike. This event is the earliest recorded labor strike in the history of the world, and the papyrus that documents it is one of the most extraordinary historical records in existence.

The cause of the strike was straightforward: the regular delivery of grain rations that were supposed to sustain the village had been interrupted, apparently due to failures in the state supply system during a period when the central government was under increasing economic pressure. The craftsmen had gone without their rations for some time, and their families were hungry. On the 10th day of the second month of winter in the 29th year of Ramesses III, the workers down their tools and abandoned their work sites, marching to the outer gate of the necropolis and sitting down in protest.

The papyrus records the complaints the workers made to the scribes and officials who came to address them: "We have come out of hunger and thirst; we have no clothing, no fat, no fish, no vegetables." The workers refused to return to work until their rations were delivered. The local officials who managed the necropolis apparently agreed that the complaint was legitimate and worked to extract the overdue rations from the local grain stores, including taking grain from the temple granaries. The workers received some of their back-pay and returned to work, but the strikes continued sporadically in subsequent months as the supply problem persisted.

The Turin Strike Papyrus is remarkable for multiple reasons. It demonstrates that the workers of Deir el-Medina understood their collective power and were willing to use it, that they had access to a recognized protocol for making their complaints heard, and that the state authorities had to respond to their demands with concrete action rather than merely punishing them. The document is also remarkable for the humanity of its language: the workers are recorded expressing their needs in direct, personal terms that give the ancient Egyptians an immediacy that no formal royal inscription can match. The first labor strike in history was not an ideological action but a hungry people insisting that those who controlled the food supply honor their obligations.

Tomb Robbery in Antiquity

The Valley of the Kings was never as secure as its creators hoped. Almost from the beginning of its use as a royal burial ground, thieves found their way into the tombs and removed objects of value, particularly the gold and other precious metals that accompanied the royal burials. The problem of tomb robbery in ancient Thebes is documented in a remarkable series of legal papyri from the late 20th Dynasty (roughly 1110–1070 BCE), which record the investigations, trials, and executions associated with major robbery cases. These documents, known as the Abbott Papyrus, the Amherst Papyrus, the Harris Papyrus A, and others, give a detailed picture of the mechanics of tomb robbery and the official response to it.

The Abbott Papyrus, one of the most important of these documents, records an official inspection of the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings conducted in the 16th year of Ramesses IX (c. 1110 BCE). The inspectors went from tomb to tomb, checking the seals and the integrity of the burial chambers, and recorded their findings in detail. Many of the tombs were found to be intact; some had been broken into and partially robbed; and a few had been severely damaged. The document also records the investigation of the robberies, including the interrogation of suspects under torture, the identification of accomplices, and the prosecution of those convicted.

The scale of the robbing was apparently enormous. In later periods, evidence suggests that virtually every royal tomb in the Valley of the Kings had been robbed of its portable valuables — gold, silver, precious stones, fine textiles, oils, and other perishables. The mummies themselves were sometimes damaged in the process, either by robbers seeking amulets and jewelry that might have been placed between the mummy wrappings, or by the general disruption of robbing activities. The question of how many people were involved in the robbery networks — whether they included necropolis officials, tomb builders with insider knowledge of the tomb layouts, or even priests — is one of the most interesting unresolved questions in the study of the late New Kingdom.

The Deir el-Bahari Royal Cache and the Abd el-Rassul Family

The most dramatic response to the problem of tomb robbery was the decision of the priests of the 21st Dynasty (c. 1069–945 BCE) to remove the royal mummies from their tombs and rebury them in secret locations where they would be safe from further depredation. The priests evidently made this decision after years of watching the royal tombs be systematically looted despite the best security measures the state could mount.

Over the course of the 21st Dynasty, the mummies of the most important New Kingdom pharaohs were collected, rewrapped, relabeled with dockets recording their identity, and reinterred in two primary caches. One, at a site now designated TT320, was cut high in the cliffs of Deir el-Bahari, above and behind Hatshepsut's mortuary temple on the west bank. The other, in the tomb of Amenhotep II in the Valley of the Kings (KV35), contained a smaller number of mummies.

The Deir el-Bahari cache lay undisturbed for nearly three thousand years. When it was eventually rediscovered, it was not by trained archaeologists but by members of a local family, the Abd el-Rassul family of Gurna village, who found the shaft and its contents sometime in the 1870s. Rather than report the discovery, the family began selling objects from the cache quietly on the antiquities market, maintaining the secrecy of the find for several years. The unusual objects appearing on the market eventually attracted the attention of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, and in 1881 one of the Abd el-Rassul brothers, under pressure, revealed the location of the cache to the Egyptologist Émile Brugsch.

Brugsch descended into the shaft in June 1881 and found himself in a corridor containing the coffins and mummies of more than 40 pharaohs and high priests, packed closely together in the darkness. The pharaohs included some of the greatest names in Egyptian history: Thutmose III, Ramesses II, Seti I, Ramesses III, Ahmose I, and many others. They had been waiting there, in the silence of the Theban hills, for three thousand years. Brugsch, recognizing the importance of the discovery but also anxious about security, organized the removal of the entire contents of the cache within 48 hours, loading the mummies onto a boat for transport to Cairo. It is said that as the boat made its way north on the Nile, the local people on the bank spontaneously lined up to mourn the passing of the ancient kings, the women wailing and the men firing rifles in the air — though this account may be apocryphal.

The royal mummies of the Deir el-Bahari cache are now in the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Cairo, recently transferred there in a ceremony of considerable pomp from the Egyptian Museum, and they constitute one of the most astonishing collections of ancient human remains in the world.

Howard Carter and the Discovery of Tutankhamun

The story of the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922 is one of the great adventure stories in the history of archaeology and one of the most consequential finds of the 20th century. The discoverer was Howard Carter, a British Egyptologist who had spent his entire professional life working in the Theban necropolis and who had become convinced, against the prevailing opinion of most of his colleagues, that the valley still contained at least one major undiscovered royal tomb.

Carter's conviction was based partly on a set of objects found in the valley in 1908 during his excavations for the American financier Theodore Davis: a small pit (later designated KV54) that contained embalming materials, broken pottery, and small objects bearing the name of Tutankhamun. Carter reasoned that if these objects were near the tomb of Tutankhamun, the tomb itself might be nearby. Davis, however, considered the valley exhausted of major finds, and when Carter began working for Lord Carnarvon in the 1910s, he returned to the systematic excavation of the valley with a specific focus on finding Tutankhamun's tomb.

Carter worked methodically, dividing the valley floor into a grid and excavating section by section. By 1922, his and Carnarvon's resources were nearly exhausted, and Carnarvon was prepared to abandon the project. Carter persuaded him to fund one final season. On November 4, 1922, a water carrier boy working on Carter's dig struck a stone step in the valley floor. Carter ordered his workers to clear the debris, and as the afternoon wore on, the outlines of a staircase emerged, descending to a plastered doorway bearing the seals of the royal necropolis.

Carter filled the staircase with rubble to protect it and sent an urgent telegram to Lord Carnarvon in England: "At last have made wonderful discovery in Valley; a magnificent tomb with seals intact; re-covered same for your arrival." Carnarvon arrived in Luxor on November 23, and on November 26, 1922, the doorway was cleared and Carter made a small hole in the upper left-hand corner of the sealed door. Carnarvon asked if he could see anything. Carter's reply, preserved in his own account of the discovery, has become one of the most famous statements in the history of exploration: "Yes, wonderful things."

What Carter could see through the hole, in the flickering light of his candle, was the antechamber of Tutankhamun's tomb: piled high with golden objects, gilded furniture, alabaster vessels, painted chests, overturned ritual couches in the form of animals, dismantled chariots gilded with gold, and dozens of other treasures arranged in an organized but not formal way, as if the funeral parties who placed them there had done so carefully but informally, filling the room with the paraphernalia of the king's life and his journey to the afterlife. The room had not been entered by any human being since the ancient priests sealed the doorway sometime around 1323 BCE.

The clearance of the tomb took Carter and his team ten years, working with meticulous care to document and preserve every object before it was moved. The excavation of Tutankhamun's tomb is still regarded as the model for the documentation of a complex archaeological find: Carter's notebooks, photographs, and object cards, now digitized and available online, are a monument to the highest standards of archaeological practice. The objects found in the tomb — more than 5,000 of them — are still being studied by Egyptologists and conservators nearly a century later, and new discoveries continue to emerge from their study.

The discovery of Tutankhamun attracted worldwide attention immediately. The newspapers of the day carried extensive coverage, and the public fascination with ancient Egypt that the discovery ignited has never entirely subsided. The "curse of Tutankhamun," a story generated largely by press speculation about the deaths of several people associated with the discovery, has no factual basis but has given Tutankhamun's tomb an additional layer of mythology that persists in popular culture to the present day.

Modern Luxor: Tourism, Conservation, and Challenges

Modern Luxor is one of the world's primary archaeological tourism destinations, receiving several million visitors annually in normal years. Tourism is the dominant industry of the city and the primary economic driver for the entire Luxor governorate. The major sites on both the east and west banks are maintained by the Egyptian government's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, which manages access, maintenance, and ongoing excavation and conservation work at the sites.

Tourism at Luxor has had a turbulent history in recent decades. The 1997 massacre at Deir el-Bahri, in which 62 people were killed by Islamic extremist gunmen, devastated visitor numbers for several years and led to the imposition of stringent security measures at all archaeological sites. The Egyptian revolution of 2011 and subsequent political instability again reduced tourism significantly, as did the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020–2022. The industry has shown resilience, recovering relatively quickly after each disruption, though the long-term dependence of Luxor's economy on a single industry remains a structural vulnerability.

The Luxor Temple sound and light show, held several times weekly on the riverfront adjacent to the temple, is one of the most popular tourist experiences in the city, providing a dramatic illuminated narration of the temple's history for visitors of all backgrounds. Similar shows are held at Karnak. The shows, first developed in the 1960s, have been updated with more modern technology and remain one of the most effective ways for visitors with limited time to absorb the atmosphere and history of the sites.

The Hot Air Balloon Industry and the 2013 Disaster

One of Luxor's most distinctive tourist activities is the hot air balloon flight over the west bank at dawn, an experience that offers a spectacular aerial view of the Valley of the Kings, the mortuary temples, and the Nile valley at the most dramatic moment of the day, when the desert light is at its most extraordinary. The hot air balloon industry at Luxor began in the 1990s and grew rapidly, becoming one of the most popular optional activities for visitors.

On February 26, 2013, the industry suffered the worst accident in the history of Egyptian ballooning when a hot air balloon carrying 21 passengers caught fire and crashed near the Nile on the west bank. All but two of the passengers died, making it one of the deadliest hot air balloon accidents in history. The cause was found to be a helium pipe that hit the balloon's burner, igniting the balloon's fabric as it descended. The disaster prompted a temporary suspension of balloon flights, a review of safety standards, and significant tightening of regulations governing the industry. Balloon flights resumed after several months and continue today, though under more stringent oversight.