The City the Greeks Called Thebes
The Egyptians who built Karnak and Luxor Temple never called their city Luxor. They called it Waset, and its temples were dedicated to Amun-Ra, king of the gods. It was the Greeks, visiting centuries later, who named it Thebai after their own city, and the name Thebes stuck in Western history books ever since. The Arabic name that eventually replaced it — al-Uqsur, "the palaces," which became Luxor — was coined by people arriving generations after the pharaohs, looking at the ruined temple walls rising out of the desert and assuming they were looking at a lost royal city rather than a religious one.
For roughly five centuries during the New Kingdom, from about 1550 to 1070 BC, Thebes was the capital of an empire that stretched from Nubia to the Euphrates. Karnak grew for two thousand years because it was never one pharaoh's project — each ruler added a pylon, a hall, an obelisk, partly out of piety and partly to prove they had out-built their predecessor. The result is a complex where walking from the first pylon to the sacred lake means walking through two millennia of architectural one-upmanship, compressed into half a mile of sandstone.
A Capital Divided by a River
Ancient Thebans organized their city around a strict division that still shapes how a visitor moves through Luxor today. The east bank, where the sun rises, held the temples of the living — Karnak and Luxor Temple, built for worship, festivals and the daily rituals of a functioning state religion. The west bank, where the sun sets, was reserved for the dead: the Valley of the Kings, the Valley of the Queens, and the mortuary temples of Hatshepsut, Ramesses II and Ramesses III. A pharaoh crossed the river only once in the direction that mattered, carried to a tomb built years or decades in advance by a workforce that lived in its own purpose-built village at Deir el-Medina, sealed off from the rest of the west bank by royal decree.
That division outlived the New Kingdom by three thousand years. It is why a modern itinerary still splits itself the same way — east bank for temples, west bank for tombs — and why crossing the Nile between the two still feels, even now, like crossing between two different registers of the city.
From Ruin to Resort
By the time European travelers began arriving in numbers during the nineteenth century, much of Thebes lay buried under sand, its temples serving as quarries, its tombs as shelter. The Avenue of Sphinxes connecting Karnak to Luxor Temple was covered so thoroughly that its rediscovery did not begin until 1949, and the full excavation was not finished until 2021. The Sofitel Winter Palace, opened in 1907 to house the wealthy travelers who came for the antiquities, became a functioning part of that history rather than a bystander to it: when Howard Carter's excavation team broke into Tutankhamun's tomb in November 1922, the hotel's own noticeboard was where the world's press first read the news, dispatched from the terrace where guests still take breakfast.
What makes Luxor unusual among ancient capitals is how little distance separates the monument from the modern town built around it. The market streets run a few hundred meters from a 3,400-year-old temple that has never stopped being used — first for the worship of Amun, then briefly as a Roman legionary shrine, and today as the site of a still-active mosque built directly into its walls. Layers of history in most cities have to be excavated to be seen. In Luxor, several of them are still standing, side by side, in daily use.