Luxor Temple

Unlike almost every other Egyptian temple, Luxor sits in the middle of a living town, and it is the only major site that is arguably better after dark — floodlit, with the columns throwing shadows up the walls and the modern city humming just beyond the fence.

You enter past a single obelisk of Ramesses II and two seated colossi. Its twin obelisk is in Paris, on the Place de la Concorde, given to France in the 1830s. Beyond the pylon, a colonnade of fourteen columns nearly sixteen metres tall runs towards the older court of Amenhotep III.

Two layers you cannot miss

• The Mosque of Abu el-Haggag, built into the temple wall and still in daily use — its door now hangs high above the excavated courtyard, showing exactly how deep the rubble was when it was built
• The Roman chapel in the rear, where legionaries plastered over pharaonic reliefs and painted a shrine to the imperial cult — the plaster has since flaked, so both layers are visible at once

The Avenue of Sphinxes runs from the entrance all the way to Karnak, 2.7 kilometres north.

Luxor Temple was not a mortuary temple and it was not really the house of a single god. It was built for the Opet Festival: once a year, the statue of Amun travelled by barque from Karnak to Luxor, and in the sanctuary here the king's divine essence was renewed. In effect, the building existed to re-crown the pharaoh annually — a machine for manufacturing legitimacy.

Amenhotep III built most of it in the 14th century BCE; Ramesses II added the great forecourt, the pylon, the colossi and the obelisks, and — characteristically — inscribed his own name across a good deal of what was already there.

Continuously in use for 3,400 years

This is what makes Luxor unusual. When Egyptian religion ended, the temple became a Roman fort — the camp gave the site its Arabic name, al-Uqsur, "the palaces", from which "Luxor" comes. Then a Christian church stood inside the courtyard. Then, in the 13th century, a mosque was built over the accumulated debris, and it is still in use today.

When the temple was excavated in the 19th century, archaeologists dug down around the mosque and left it standing where it was — thirteen metres above the ancient floor, on top of everything that had happened in between.