Luxor & Esna
After breakfast on-board, explore the Valley of the Kings, a vast City of the Dead where magnificent tombs were carved into the desert rocks, decorated richly and filled with treasures for the afterlife by generations of Pharaohs. Then head to the West Bank, home to the Valley of the Queens, Hatshepsut Temple, the Valley of Workers, the Tombs of the Nobles, Medinet Habu or the Ramesseum Temple.
There are between 75 and 80 tombs in the Valley of the Queens, or Biban al-Harim, belonging to Queens of the 18th, 19th and 20th Dynasties. It is called the Place of Beauty by the Egyptians and is where the Pharaohs’ wives and children were buried.
Rising out of the desert plain in a series of dazzling white terraces, Hatshepsut Temple – the Mortuary Temple of Queen Hatshepsut – merges with the sheer limestone cliffs that surround it. Forming a natural rock amphitheatre, this temple was an important religious and funerary site.
The remains of the Valley of Workers (Deir El Medina), the self-contained village on the West Bank where the workers who built the kings’ and queens’ tombs lived in mud-brick houses with their families, give archaeologists a vivid view of how urban people lived in ancient Egypt. You can also visit the tombs that the workers created for themselves. Nearby you’ve also got the Temple of Deir El Medina, from Ptolemaic times.
Also on the West Bank sits the Tombs of the Nobles – 400 tombs of Theban aristocrats, some of which you can enter. The tomb walls were white-washed and painted with murals of the nobles’ daily lives, making them quite different from royal tombs, where relief work focused on judgment and resurrection. Since the tombs were not sealed, some have since deteriorated.
The magnificent Medinet Habu is a series of temples built by the Pharaoh Ramses III (1182-1151 BC) and second only to Karnak Temple in size and complexity. The most monumental is the Mortuary Temple of Ramses III, decorated with relief work depicting his many military victories. With its massive mudbrick enclosure that held storehouses, workshops, administrative offices and residences of priests and officials, Medinet Habu grew into a city that maintained its population well into Coptic times.
The Ramesseum Temple, the Mortuary Temple of Ramses II, was built early in the Great Pharaoh’s reign and was 20 years in the making. Here you’ll see the broken granite Colossus of Ramses II, a 1000-ton statue in which the fingers alone are over one metre long, which also inspired the famous poem ‘Ozymandias’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley. This temple reportedly rivalled the wonders of Ramses II’s temple at Abu Simbel.
Once you reach Esna, visit the Greco-Roman Temple of Khnum. The beautifully preserved Great Hypostyle Hall was built during the reign of the Roman Emperor Claudius; it was excavated from the silt that had accumulated through centuries of annual Nile floods and is about nine metres below present-day street level.
Stay: Sanctuary Zein Nile Château in Esna