Luxor

Luxor stands on ancient Thebes, a provincial town on the east bank that rose when its rulers reunited Egypt at the start of the Middle Kingdom. From about 1550 BC, under the pharaohs of the New Kingdom, it became the religious capital of an empire that reached into Nubia and the Levant. The god Amun was worshipped at Karnak, enlarged by king after king for some two thousand years, and linked by a processional avenue to the temple at Luxor. On the opposite bank, in the dry valleys behind the cliffs, kings and queens were buried in cut and painted tombs, with their mortuary temples along the edge of the floodplain and a village of tomb-workers at Deir el-Medina.

Political power moved north in later dynasties, and an earthquake, Assyrian and then Persian attacks and the shift of religion left the temples decaying. The Romans put a fort around Luxor Temple, Christians built churches inside the sanctuaries, and in the 13th century the mosque of Abu el-Haggag rose on the accumulated debris that half-buried the temple, where it still stands.

Modern Luxor grew with excavation and tourism. Nineteenth-century travellers, dealers and archaeologists cleared and carried off much of what they found; Howard Carter's discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922 made the name famous worldwide. In 1979 UNESCO inscribed Ancient Thebes with its Necropolis as a World Heritage Site. In 1997 militants attacked visitors at Hatshepsut's temple, killing 62 people, most of them foreign tourists, and the trade took years to recover. Since then the city has been remade around tourism, with clearance along the avenue of sphinxes, which reopened in 2021, and long arguments over the houses removed for it.

Luxor is a Sa'idi city — Upper Egyptian in speech, dress and manners. Many men wear the galabiya and turban, families are large and closely tied, hospitality is emphatic, and reputation within the clan still matters. Conservative custom sits alongside a century of contact with foreign visitors, which has made Luxor more practised with outsiders than most of Upper Egypt without changing its core.

Religious life centres on the mosque of Abu el-Haggag, the 13th-century saint whose tomb sits on top of Luxor Temple. His moulid fills the streets with processions in which decorated boats are carried through the town — a custom that observers have often compared to the ancient Opet festival, when statues of the gods travelled by river between Karnak and Luxor. Coptic Christians form a significant minority, with their own churches and feasts.

The city's other culture is the culture of archaeology. Foreign and Egyptian missions have dug here every winter for more than a century, and families on the west bank have supplied excavation workers for generations, some of them famous in the history of the discipline. Alabaster workshops, tomb-painting copyists and antiquities guards are ordinary professions. Music at weddings uses the rababa and drums, and tahtib, the stick dance of Upper Egypt, is performed on festive occasions.

About 285,000 people live in the city, on both banks and in the newer districts out in the desert. The east bank holds the commercial town, the governorate offices, hospitals and schools; the west bank is a string of villages among sugarcane, alfalfa and vegetable fields, where farming and tourism support each other. Families that once lived directly over the tombs at Qurna were moved to purpose-built settlements, a long and contested process that reshaped the west bank.

Almost everything depends on visitors. Guides, drivers, boat crews, caleche drivers, hotel and cruise staff, shopkeepers and alabaster workers all live from the winter season, and Luxor feels the effect of any regional crisis immediately. Agriculture is the other pillar, with sugarcane sent to refineries in the valley, and government employment and the airport add the rest.

The day is shaped by heat. Work and sightseeing start soon after dawn, the middle of the day empties the streets, and life returns in the late afternoon, when the Corniche, the cafés and the market fill and stay busy well into the night. Households face the same national pressures of inflation and the cost of living, made sharper by work that comes only for part of the year.

Luxor eats Upper Egyptian food: plain, filling and built on bread. 'Aish baladi, the round wholemeal flatbread sold in every neighbourhood, is torn into stews. Ful medames and taameya, the broad-bean falafel, are breakfast; koshary, the layered rice, lentils and macaroni with fried onion and tomato sauce, is the standard cheap lunch. Tagines — meat, okra, green beans or potato baked in a clay pot — are the restaurant staple, along with grilled chicken and kofta and the mezze of tahini, baba ghanoush and salads that come before them.

Pigeon is the celebratory bird, stuffed with rice or freekeh and roasted, and fish from the Nile, mostly tilapia, is grilled or fried at simple riverside places. Molokhia, the green jute-leaf soup, is poured over rice with rabbit or chicken. Around the feast days lamb and goat are slaughtered and shared. Dates come from the palms along the river, and sugarcane, grown in the fields on both banks, is pressed into juice at street stands.

Sweet things and drinks fill the evening: basbousa soaked in syrup, kunafa, rice pudding, and tea drunk strong, dark and very sweet in small glasses. Karkadeh, the deep red hibiscus infusion, is served hot in winter and iced in summer, and tamarind and liquorice drinks are sold from brass urns in the market.