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History
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The name Luxor derives from the Arabic
El-Uqsur
- meaning "the palaces" or "the castles" - a name which may have referred to a Roman
castrum
or the town's appearance in medieval times, when it squatted admidst the ruins of
Thebes
. This, in turn, was the Greek name for the city known to the ancient Egyptians as
Weset,
originally an obscure provincial town during the Old Kingdom, when Egypt was ruled from Memphis. After power ebbed to regional overlords in the First Intermediate Period, Weset/Thebes gained ascendancy in Upper Egypt under Mentuhotpe II (c.2100 BC), who reunited Egypt under the Middle Kingdom. Though this dissolved into anarchy, the town survived as a power base for local princes who eventually liberated Egypt from the Hyksos invaders, reunited the Two Lands and founded the XVIII Dynasty (c.1567 BC).
As the capital of the New Kingdom , whose empire stretched from Nubia to Palestine, Thebes's ascendancy was paralleled by that of Amun , whose cult temple at Karnak became the greatest in Egypt. At its zenith under the XVIII and XIX dynasties, Thebes may have had a population of around a million; Homer's Iliad describes it as a "city with a hundred gates". Excluding the brief Amarna Period (c.1379-1362 BC), when the "heretic" Akhenaten moved the capital northwards and forbade the worship of Amun, the dynasty's - and city's - supremacy lasted some five hundred years. Even after the end of the Ramessid line, when the capital returned to Memphis and thence moved to the Delta, Thebes remained the foremost city of Upper Egypt, enjoying a final fling as a royal seat under the Nubian rulers of the XXV Dynasty (c.747-645 BC). Though Thebes persisted through Ptolemaic into Roman times, it retained but a shadow of its former glory, and might have been abandoned like Memphis were it not for Christian settlements. During Muslim times its only claim to fame was the tomb of Abu el-Haggag, a twelfth-century sheikh. However, Napoleon's expedition to Egypt awakened foreign interest in its antiquities , which were gradually cleared during the nineteenth century, and have drawn visitors ever since.
To be fair, not every visitor to Luxor has been unequivocally impressed by its ancient monuments: during the filming of
Death on the Nile,
Hollywood icon Bette Davis famously remarked that "In my day we'd have built all this at the studio - and better". Other useful information
for tourists (each section contains more specific sub-sections): |
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Egypt,
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