Luxor Temple

Start with the ground beneath your feet. Pale sandstone flagging, worn smooth, warm even in the early evening. Somewhere behind you, traffic hums along the Corniche, the road that follows the Nile. Ahead, two enormous seated figures rise from the stone. Their faces are calm and a little damaged. They have watched this river for more than three thousand years. You are standing at the entrance to Luxor Temple, in the heart of a modern Egyptian city that the ancient world knew as Thebes.

Thebes was one of the great religious capitals of ancient Egypt. It reached its height during the New Kingdom, the age of the most powerful pharaohs, more than three thousand years ago. Here, on the east bank of the Nile, the living city stood. Across the water, on the west bank, lay the tombs and memorial temples of the dead. Luxor Temple belongs to the living side. It was built to celebrate the gods, and also the sacred nature of kingship itself.

Look up at the great gateway in front of you. Egyptologists call this kind of wall a pylon, a huge sloping gate tower that marks the entrance to a temple. This one was raised by Ramesses the Second, one of the most ambitious builders Egypt ever had. Its outer faces carry scenes of his military campaigns, including the Battle of Kadesh against the Hittites. Ramesses made sure that every visitor entering the temple first saw him as a victorious warrior.

Now look to the left of the gateway. A single obelisk stands there, a tall four-sided needle of pink granite covered in carved hieroglyphs. Here is a detail most visitors miss. There were once two obelisks, one on each side. The second one now stands in Paris, in the Place de la Concorde. It was given to France in the nineteenth century and shipped across the Mediterranean in the 1830s. The empty base on the right still marks where it stood.

Before you go inside, turn around and look north. A long avenue runs away from the temple, lined on both sides with rows of sphinxes, creatures with the bodies of lions and the heads of men. This processional road connects Luxor Temple with the vast temple complex of Karnak, roughly three kilometres away. For centuries much of it lay buried under houses and streets. After years of excavation, the full avenue was reopened to the public with a grand ceremony in 2021.

That avenue explains why this temple exists at all. Once a year, during the flood season, Thebes held a great celebration called the Opet Festival. Priests carried the statues of the god Amun, his wife Mut, and their son Khonsu out of Karnak. They brought them here in sacred boats, by land and by river. The festival renewed the bond between the god and the reigning king. For the people of Thebes, it was a time of music, offerings, and feasting.

Walk through the gateway into the first open court. Here you will notice something unexpected. High on your left, built right into the ancient walls, sits a mosque. This is the Mosque of Abu al-Haggag, named after a local holy man who is still honoured in Luxor today. Look closely at one of its doorways. It opens in midair, well above the floor of the temple. That door once stood at street level.

How can a door float above the ground like that? Over many centuries, sand, mud, and the debris of daily life slowly buried the temple. A village grew on top of it, and the mosque was built at that higher level. When archaeologists cleared the temple in the late nineteenth century, they dug down to the original floor. The mosque stayed where it was. The gap between the two levels shows you exactly how deep the temple once lay.

Continue south and you enter a long corridor of giant columns. Their tops are carved in the shape of open papyrus flowers, a plant that grew thickly along the Nile. This colonnade was begun by Amenhotep the Third, the pharaoh who built the oldest core of the temple. Its walls were decorated later, under the young king Tutankhamun. The reliefs show the Opet procession itself: boats, musicians, dancers, and priests moving between the two great temples.

Beyond the colonnade lies a wide court surrounded by double rows of columns. This is the heart of Amenhotep the Third's temple, and many people consider it the most elegant space here. In the late afternoon the columns throw long shadows across the floor. In the 1980s, workers found a remarkable cache of statues buried beneath this court. Ancient priests had hidden them carefully, perhaps to protect them. Several of them are now displayed in the Luxor Museum nearby.

The temple did not stop changing when the pharaohs disappeared. Deeper inside, you will find a small shrine where Alexander the Great appears in carved relief. He wears the full regalia of an Egyptian pharaoh and makes offerings to Amun. Later, Roman soldiers built a fortified camp around the temple. In one chamber, they plastered over the ancient reliefs and painted bright frescoes of Roman officials. Conservators have cleaned these paintings, and their colours show clearly against the old stone.

So one building holds many layers of belief. Egyptian gods, a Greek-born king dressed as a pharaoh, Roman soldiers, early Christian worshippers, and a living mosque all share these walls. Few places on Earth hold so many centuries in a single walk. As the sun goes down, floodlights come on across the courts. The sandstone turns gold, and the carvings stand out sharply in the artificial light. Many visitors return after dark just to see this change.

Before you leave, stop for a moment in the open court and listen. You may hear the call to prayer from the mosque above you. You may hear the clatter of a horse carriage on the Corniche, or voices from the city outside. Look once more at the seated king by the gateway. He has watched the river, the festivals, the soldiers, and the villagers come and go. Tonight, he watches you walk back out into Luxor.