Luxor Temple is an ancient Egyptian temple on the east bank of the Nile in the city of Luxor, the ancient Thebes, about 670 km south of Cairo. It was begun by Amenhotep III around 1400 BCE and enlarged by Ramesses II, who added the great pylon and its pair of obelisks; one of those obelisks has stood in the Place de la Concorde in Paris since 1836. The Egyptians called it ipet resyt, “the southern sanctuary”, and it was the destination of the yearly Opet Festival, when the statue of Amun was carried here from Karnak along a 2.7 km avenue of sphinxes. UNESCO listed it in 1979 as part of ancient Thebes and its necropolis.
Amenhotep III’s Southern Sanctuary on the Nile
The oldest standing parts of the temple, at its southern end, belong to Amenhotep III of the Eighteenth Dynasty, who ruled from about 1388 to 1351 BCE (the dates shift by a year or two between chronologies). His reign was a peak of wealth and building in Egypt, and at Luxor he raised a sanctuary for the Theban Triad: Amun, his consort Mut and their son Khonsu.
Luxor was never a temple to a god in the ordinary sense, and it was not a mortuary temple either. Scholars of the Epigraphic Survey, which has recorded the temple’s inscriptions, argue that it was devoted to the royal ka, the divine spirit of kingship that passed from one pharaoh to the next. Amenhotep III made the point personal: on the temple walls he had his own divine birth carved, claiming that Amun had taken the form of his father, Thutmose IV, to father him with the minor wife Mutemwiya. Pharaohs may have been crowned here, in reality or symbolically, which is why later rulers who needed legitimacy kept coming back to the building.
Amenhotep III also began the tall processional colonnade that now forms the temple’s middle section. Tutankhamun finished its decoration a few decades later and filled its walls with scenes of the Opet procession, so the reliefs that tell the story of the festival are partly his work.
Ramesses II’s Pylon and the Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde
About 150 years after Amenhotep III, Ramesses II, who reigned from 1279 to 1213 BCE, gave the temple the front it has today. He built a forecourt and a massive entrance pylon, set colossal seated statues of himself before it, and covered the pylon with his account of Kadesh, his 1274 BCE clash with the Hittites in Syria. The same battle account appears at Karnak, Abydos, the Ramesseum and Abu Simbel, and although Ramesses presented it as a personal triumph, historians generally regard the battle as a stalemate. The seated colossi at the pylon are now read as ka statues, images of the king as the living embodiment of royal power.
In front of the pylon Ramesses set two obelisks of red granite, each cut from a single block in the Aswan quarries about 160 km upstream and brought down the Nile by barge. They were not the same height. The shorter one stood on a taller pedestal and a little further from the pylon, so that someone walking toward the gate would see them as a matched pair.
The western, shorter obelisk, about 23 m high, is the one that left Egypt. In November 1830 Muhammad Ali Pasha, ruler of Ottoman Egypt, gave both Luxor obelisks to France, after Jean-François Champollion had urged the French to choose them over any others. The western stone was lowered in 1831, shipped on a vessel built for the job and named Luxor, reached Paris in 1833 and was raised in the centre of the Place de la Concorde on 25 October 1836 before King Louis-Philippe and a large crowd. Champollion did not see it; he died in 1832 while the obelisk was still on its way. The move cost an estimated 2.5 million francs, which may explain why the second obelisk never followed, and on 26 September 1981 President François Mitterrand formally gave up France’s claim to it. It still stands on the left of the Luxor gateway, beside the gap where its partner once was.
The Opet Festival Procession from Karnak
The temple’s main purpose shows most clearly in the Opet Festival, the “beautiful festival of Opet”, held every year in the second month of Akhet, the season of the Nile flood. The statues of Amun, Mut and Khonsu left their shrines at Karnak in sacred barques and travelled south to Luxor, either carried overland along the sphinx avenue or by river in Amun’s gilded boat, the Userhat-Amun, built of Lebanese cedar with a ram’s head at prow and stern.
At Luxor, in the inner rooms, the king met the god, and a re-crowning ceremony renewed him as Amun’s son and the link between the gods and Egypt. The festival grew longer as the New Kingdom went on. Under Thutmose III it lasted 11 days; by the accession of Ramesses III in 1187 BCE it ran to 24 days, and by his death in 1156 BCE to 27.
The 2.7 km Avenue of Sphinxes, Reopened in November 2021
The overland route between the two temples was a straight processional road about 2.7 km long, called in Egyptian the “path of god” and today in Arabic Tariq al-Kibash, the Rams’ Road. Work on it began in the New Kingdom, and it was finished by Nectanebo I of the Thirtieth Dynasty, who reigned from 380 to 362 BCE. Six barque shrines stood along it as way stations where the gods’ boats could rest during the procession.
Over the centuries the avenue disappeared under sand, silt and houses. The French scholars of the Description de l’Égypte (1809) recorded it as about 2,000 m long and lined with more than 600 sphinxes, and in 1893 Georges Daressy reported that the Luxor end lay below the water table and could not be dug. The first sphinxes near the temple came to light in 1949, when the Egyptian archaeologist Mohammed Zakaria Ghoneim found eight statues; more were uncovered between 1958 and 1964, and the full route was traced from 1984 to 2000. After seven decades of excavation and restoration the road reopened on 25 November 2021 with a night-time parade attended by President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. It is lined with 1,057 statues: 807 human-headed sphinxes and 250 with rams’ heads.
Alexander the Great’s Barque Shrine and the Roman Legion
Luxor’s role as a place where kingship was renewed made it valuable to foreign rulers. Alexander the Great entered Egypt in late 332 BCE, was declared son of Amun by the oracle at Siwa, and was crowned at Memphis before leaving for Asia early in 331 BCE. At Luxor he had a chapel built for the sacred barque of Amun among the rooms at the rear of the temple, beside those of Amenhotep III. He claimed to have been crowned at Luxor, although he may never have travelled south of Memphis.
Under Roman rule, from 30 BCE to 641 CE, Thebes shrank. The geographer Strabo described it in the 1st century CE as little more than a village, and what remained of the town clustered around the Luxor pylon. Around the temple the Romans built a legionary fortress, which became the seat of Roman government in the area and housed troops during campaigns in Nubia. A chapel originally for Mut was converted into a shrine of the imperial cult of the Tetrarchy, the four-emperor system of around 300 CE, and later into a church. In 126 CE a small mudbrick shrine to Serapis and Isis was set up in the court of Nectanebo I and dedicated on the birthday of the emperor Hadrian.
The Abu Haggag Mosque Above the Court of Ramesses II
From the Middle Ages the people of Luxor lived inside and on top of the half-buried temple, and their debris built up into a mound some 14.5 to 15 m high. Within that mound, part of the temple was turned into a church in 395 CE, and in the Ayyubid period, under Sultan as-Salih Ayyub in the 13th century, a mosque was built on the site of a demolished basilica in the court of Ramesses II, around the tomb of Sheikh Yusuf Abu al-Haggag. Some accounts instead date the first mosque on the spot to around 640, soon after the Arab conquest.
When Gaston Maspero began clearing the temple after 1884, he had to buy out houses, stores, barracks and pigeon towers before he could dig, and excavation went on in stages until 1960. The working mosque was the one structure that was never removed, so it still sits above the excavated floor of the court. After a fire in June 2007, a two-year restoration costing E£7 million strengthened the dome and widened the prayer area; during the work, columns and lintels carved with the names of Ramesses II came to light.
At the mosque’s yearly mawlid, which culminates about 15 days before Ramadan, boats are carried in procession around the temple, and local organisers themselves describe the rites as intertwined with the pharaonic festivals. Whether this is a direct survival of Opet or a later echo is debated, but it means boats still circle the temple some 3,400 years after Amun’s barque first arrived here.
Luxor Temple Within Ancient Thebes, UNESCO 1979
Luxor Temple is one part of a much larger site. UNESCO listed the ruins of ancient Thebes with its necropolis in 1979, covering the east-bank temples of Karnak and Luxor and the tombs and mortuary temples of the west bank, including the Valley of the Kings. The modern city of Luxor had a population of 284,952 in 2023 and has grown right up to the temple walls, so the temple now stands in the town centre; the restored avenue now gives visitors a way to walk to Karnak along the same line as the procession.
Inside, the route runs from the Ramesside pylon and court, past the mosque, through Amenhotep III’s colonnade and sun court to the inner rooms with the birth scenes and Alexander’s shrine. Tourism has brought its own problems: in 2013 a Chinese student’s graffiti, reading “Ding Jinhao was here”, was found scratched on a sculpture, caused a debate about visitor numbers and was later partly cleaned off.
For the wider setting of the city, from Karnak to the tombs across the river, see our guide to ancient Thebes and its World Heritage listing, and for the river that carried Amun’s barque and the obelisks, our guide to the Nile from its sources to the delta.