Luxor holds more than a third of the world's surviving ancient monuments, but the history here runs well past the pharaohs: Coptic towns inside temple courts, a Sufi mosque perched 8m up a Pharaonic wall, and the house where Tutankhamun's tomb was announced in 1922.
Sixty-five rock-cut tombs in a limestone wadi, used from Thutmose I (c.1493 BC) to Ramesses XI. The base ticket admits you to three; KV17 (Seti I) runs 137m underground and KV62 still holds Tutankhamun's own mummy.
Three colonnaded terraces cut into the cliff for Egypt's female pharaoh around 1470 BC. The Punt Colonnade reliefs record her Red Sea trading expedition; Thutmose III later had her name and face chiselled out of the walls.
Ramesses III's mortuary temple, c.1175 BC, keeps the deepest-cut reliefs in Egypt: the naval battle against the Sea Peoples and tallies of severed hands. The Coptic town of Djeme filled these courtyards until the 9th century.
Two 18m quartzite statues of Amenhotep III, all that stood above ground of what was Egypt's largest mortuary temple. Greek and Roman visitors carved graffiti here after a 27 BC earthquake made the northern figure 'sing' at dawn.
The domed mudbrick house Carter built in 1910 and lived in through the 1922 season, restored with his darkroom, library and camp bed. A full-scale facsimile of Tutankhamun's burial chamber stands in the grounds behind it.
The 1907 Thomas Cook hotel where Carter pinned the notice of KV62's discovery to the lobby board in November 1922. Agatha Christie and King Farouk stayed here; the Victorian garden runs back three hectares toward the desert.
One underground gallery walking through embalming step by step with the actual instruments — bronze brain hooks, natron, canopic jars — plus Maserharti, a 21st-Dynasty high priest of Amun, and a mummified crocodile and cat.
The 2.7km processional road of roughly 1,050 ram- and human-headed sphinxes laid by Nectanebo I in the 4th century BC, buried under the modern town for centuries and reopened in November 2021 after a 70-year excavation.
The walled village of the craftsmen who cut the royal tombs, lived in c.1550–1080 BC. Their own painted tombs, Sennedjem's above all, sit uphill from 5,000 ostraca that record the first documented labour strike, in 1152 BC.
Hassan Fathy's 1946 mudbrick village, built to rehouse the tomb-robbing families of Old Gurna and now on the World Monuments watch list. The domed mosque, market and theatre survive among later concrete additions.
Officials' tombs painted with daily life instead of funerary spells: Rekhmire's shows Nubian and Syrian tribute arriving, Sennefer's 'Tomb of the Vines' has a grape-trellis ceiling, and Nakht's records harvest, hunting and banquets.
A 13th-century mosque standing 8m above the ground inside Luxor Temple's Ramesside court, its floor marking centuries of accumulated silt and rubble. It survived Maspero's 1885 clearance of the village that filled the temple.