Luxor Temple — archaeological site
Image by DEZALB from Pixabay

Luxor Temple

  • Elevation77 m
  • 2 min read
  • 25.700° N 32.639° E
  • UNESCO World Heritage

Interesting facts

  • In 1989 workers testing groundwater beneath Amenhotep III's sun court uncovered a buried cache of 26 superb statues of gods and kings, now in the Luxor Museum.
  • Centuries of houses and rubble had raised an artificial hill about 15 metres high over the temple, burying roughly three quarters of it.
  • The temple was built of Nubian sandstone quarried at Gebel el-Silsila, upriver from Luxor.
  • The obelisk still at the gate is the taller one; its shorter twin, now in Paris, stood on a higher base and further forward, so both looked equal.
  • Each Luxor obelisk was cut from a single block of Aswan red granite, and their slightly convex faces are unique among ancient obelisks.
  • Six barque shrines stood along the Avenue of Sphinxes as resting stations for the gods' sacred boats during festival processions.
  • In AD 126 a small mudbrick shrine to Serapis and Isis was built in the temple and dedicated to the Roman emperor Hadrian on his birthday.
  • The colossal seated figures of Ramesses II at the pylon are thought to be Ka statues, embodying the divine royal spirit at the heart of the temple's cult.
  • Part of the temple became a church in AD 395, and the mosque inside was later built on the site of that church, extending its long history of worship.
  • The annual festival of the local saint Abu al-Haggag includes boats carried in procession around the temple, a custom often compared to the ancient Opet festival.

Why it is worth it

Luxor Temple rises on the east bank of the Nile in the middle of modern Luxor, ancient Thebes, and it is the one great temple of Egypt that sits inside a living town. The ancient Egyptians called it ipet resyt, the southern sanctuary. Its core was built around 1400 BC under Amenhotep III of the 18th Dynasty, whose sun court and great colonnade are among the most beautiful spaces of the New Kingdom; Tutankhamun and above all Ramesses II added to it, and Ramesses gave it the massive entrance pylon fronted by his colossal seated statues. Alexander the Great, too, left a chapel deep inside.

The temple was bound to Karnak, about 2.7 km to the north, by an avenue lined with human-headed sphinxes. Every year during the Opet festival the statue of Amun was brought in procession from Karnak to stay here with his consort Mut, and scholars now read the temple as a place devoted to the renewal of kingship, the divine power of the ruling pharaoh. Two obelisks once flanked the entrance; they were of unequal height but placed so that they appeared equal. One still stands. The other has stood in the Place de la Concorde in Paris since the nineteenth century.

Few monuments show so many layers of faith. The Romans built a legionary fortress around the temple and turned one chapel into a shrine for the imperial cult. Part of the temple later became a church, and the Abu Haggag Mosque, still in use, stands on ancient columns inside the precinct, a reminder of how deeply sand and houses once buried the building before excavations began in the 1880s. Along with the rest of ancient Thebes it has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 1979.

Getting there

The temple stands in the centre of Luxor, on the east bank of the Nile. Luxor International Airport (LXR) is about 7.5 km away. Karnak can be reached along the route of the Avenue of Sphinxes.

Plan your visit

We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.

Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Luxor 6The Most Beautiful Places in Egypt 35The Most Remarkable Ancient Places in Egypt 5The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Sacred Places in Egypt 5The Most Beautiful Ancient Temples 6The Most Beautiful Temples in Egypt 7The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Egypt 8The Most Remarkable Archaeological Sites in Egypt 13The Greatest Archaeological Wonders in Egypt 15The Most Beautiful Sacred Places in Egypt 18The Most Beautiful Ancient Sacred Places 18The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Temples 35The Most Remarkable Ancient Archaeological Sites 36The Greatest Ancient Archaeological Wonders 52The Most Remarkable Ancient Places 78The Most Beautiful Temples 95The Most Remarkable UNESCO-Listed Archaeological Sites 114The Greatest UNESCO-Listed Archaeological Wonders 149The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Sacred Places 179The Most Remarkable Archaeological Sites 193The Greatest Archaeological Wonders 306The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites 557The Most Beautiful Sacred Places 623

From the encyclopaedia

The Luxor Temple is a large Ancient Egyptian temple complex located on the east bank of the Nile River in the city of Luxor and was constructed approximately 1400 BCE. In the Egyptian language it was known as ipet resyt, "the southern sanctuary". It was one of the two primary temples on the east bank, the other being Karnak.

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25.70000, 32.63917per Wikidata