Ancient Thebes still drawing five million visitors a year
Luxor, once Thebes, is Upper Egypt’s temple city and Luxor Governorate’s capital, with about 285,000 people in 2023 on forty-three square kilometres of urban ground. Nicknamed the City of a Hundred Gates, it ranks among the world’s oldest continuously inhabited places—and its greatest open-air museum.
Egyptian Waset—“city of the sceptre”—became the New Kingdom’s political and religious capital from the Eighteenth to Twentieth Dynasties after helping expel the Hyksos. Greeks heard Demotic ta jpt (“the temple”) as Thebai; Arabic al-quṣūr (“the palaces”) yielded Luxor. Amun, later Amun-Ra, shared cult with Mut and Khonsu; Karnak’s vast complex remained Egypt’s premier temple into late antiquity even after political power drifted north to Bubastis, Sais, and Alexandria.
Across the Nile the West Bank holds the Theban Necropolis, Valley of the Kings, Valley of the Queens, Deir el-Bahari, the Ramesseum, and Medinet Habu. Montuhotep II’s reunification in the Eleventh Dynasty first lifted the town’s stature; New Kingdom wealth drew Babylonians, Hittites, Canaanites, and Minoans. Assyrian Ashurbanipal later wrecked the city; Alexander still visited Amun’s statue during the Opet Festival. A church inside Luxor Temple became today’s Abu Haggag Mosque after the Muslim conquest.
Geography places Luxor roughly 670 kilometres from Cairo and 220 north of Aswan, with a wider governorate footprint near 416 square kilometres. About five million tourists arrive yearly for temples, churches, mosques, resorts, and hot-air balloons. Recent digs keep rewriting the map: a 3,400-year-old Aten “golden city” announced in April 2021; Thutmose II’s tomb identified near Wadi C in February 2025—the first named royal tomb since Tutankhamun in 1922. Tour buses still circle Karnak and Luxor Temple at dawn because the stone record of Thebes remains denser here than almost anywhere else.
Source: Luxor
