Luxor East and West Bank Private Day Tour

1. 

   Chapter 1 · Morning · the valley floor

   A valley chosen for silence

   The road runs out in a bowl of pale limestone. No river. No town. Just a peak shaped like a pyramid, standing guard.

   For nearly five hundred years, Egypt's kings were not raised above the ground. They were cut into it.

   “Alone, no-one seeing, no-one hearing.”

   You step down into the hill. The corridor slopes away from the daylight, and the walls turn to night.

   Twelve hours of darkness are painted here: the night the sun must cross to be born again at dawn.

   But the secret does not keep. A decade after one king is sealed in, robbers break through, and some of them are the tomb-builders' own neighbours.

   Around 1050 BC the kings' bodies are gathered up, and hidden all over again in secret caches.

   Look for: In the burial halls, the twelve hours of the night through which the sun travels to be reborn.

   Sources: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, site pages (read 2026), Valley of the Kings; Barry J. Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization (2018), p. 269; Nicholas Reeves and Richard H. Wilkinson, The Complete Valley of the Kings (1996), p. 91; Toby Wilkinson, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt (2011), pp. 253, 267–268; Jan Assmann, Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt (2005), pp. 183, 402.

2. 

   Chapter 2 · On the way · the West Bank fields

   Two kings left standing in a field

   Two giants sit in the fields, each about eighteen metres high, with nothing behind them.

   There was something. The largest royal temple known. Amenhotep the Third built it on the flood plain, so every year the river came in.

   The colossi stood in the water, like the first land rising.

   After an earthquake in 27 BC, the northern statue began to sound at sunrise. Greek and Roman visitors came to hear it.

   Then an emperor's repairs silenced it for good.

   Look for: On the northern colossus, graffiti left by Roman-era visitors, among them verses by Balbilla, a poet in Hadrian's court.

   Sources: Richard H. Wilkinson, The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt (2000), pp. 188–189; Toby Wilkinson, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt (2011), p. 183; Ian Shaw (ed.), The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (2003), p. 257; Ian Shaw and Elizabeth Bloxam (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Egyptology (2020), p. 1122.

3. 

   Chapter 3 · Late morning · Deir el-Bahari

   Three terraces against a cliff

   Turn the corner and the cliff fills your sight. At its foot, three terraces climb towards it, one above the other.

   The cliff is the point. Across the river stands Karnak, and once a year the god Amun crossed over to rest here.

   The king who built it was a woman. Hatshepsut ruled first for a boy, Thutmose the Third, then as king in her own right.

   She had herself shown as a man. Decades after her death, her names and faces were cut away.

   Probably not out of hatred, scholars now argue, but to secure the next king's claim.

   “a garden for my father Amun”

   Look for: On the middle terrace, the voyage to Punt: ships on the Red Sea, and trees brought home for the god's garden.

   Sources: Richard H. Wilkinson, The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt (2000), pp. 175–178; Barry J. Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization (2018), pp. 262, 269; Ian Shaw (ed.), The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (2003), pp. 228–241; Ian Shaw and Elizabeth Bloxam (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Egyptology (2020), p. 660.

4. 

   Chapter 4 · Morning · the first pylon

   Fifteen centuries, never finished

   You walk between two rows of rams, towards a gate its builders never finished. Their mud-brick ramps are still inside.

   Karnak grew for more than fifteen hundred years. By Ramesses the Third, the god who lived here held about a quarter of Egypt's farmland.

   When the painter David Roberts sketched it in 1838, the columns still showed their paint above the fallen stone.

   Then the hall. One hundred and thirty-four columns. The central twelve rise twenty-one metres over your head, lit through stone grilles high above.

   “Now my heart turns to and fro, in thinking what will the people say”

   Some three and a half thousand years later, here you are, saying it.

   Look for: In the hall, find where Seti the First's raised carving gives way to Ramesses the Second's deeper cuts: two kings, one wall.

   Sources: Elaine A. Sullivan, “Karnak: Development of the Temple of Amun-Ra”, UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology (2010), pp. 1–21; Ian Shaw (ed.), The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (2003), p. 298; Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, site pages (read 2026), Karnak; Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature (2019 edition), vol. II, Hatshepsut's obelisk inscription; Wikimedia Commons file records for the photographs shown (read 4 October 2026), David Roberts, Karnac, sketch dated 1838.

5. 

   Chapter 5 · Late afternoon · the colonnade

   Where the god came to be renewed

   This avenue of sphinxes runs some 2,700 metres, all the way back to Karnak. Once a year, the gods came along it in procession.

   At the Opet festival Amun came here to be renewed, and the king's own divine power was renewed with him. By Ramesses the Third, it lasted twenty-four days.

   Look at the gate. One obelisk. Its twin has stood in the Place de la Concorde in Paris ever since France was given it, in return for a clock.

   The temple never closed. Alexander the Great appears here as pharaoh. Roman soldiers turned a hall into a chapel of their emperors.

   And inside the first court, a 13th-century mosque still holds prayers.

   Look for: On the colonnade walls the Opet procession is carved in full: setting out on the west wall, coming home on the east.

   Sources: Richard H. Wilkinson, The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt (2000), pp. 166–170; John C. Darnell, “Opet Festival”, UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology (2010), p. 1; Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, site pages (read 2026), Muhammad Ali Mosque.

Times of day set the scene; your written quote confirms the timetable. Facts come from the sources named under each chapter, and where we give an opinion, it reads as ours.