We'll meet you in front of the Luxor museum. You will see our tour leader holding a red flag. Then we use horse carriage to go to our next stop, Karnak Temple.

Construction at Karnak started 4,000 years ago and continued until the Romans took control of Egypt about 2,000 years ago. Each Egyptian ruler who worked at Karnak left their architectural mark. It was, at its peak, the largest and most important religious complex in ancient Egypt. The most significant structure, and the largest religious building ever built, is the Temple of Amun-Ra, considered where that god lived on earth with his wife, Mut, and son, Khonsu, who also have temples at the site. The Temple of Amun-Ra is particularly famous for the vast Hypostyle Hall constructed during the reign of Seti I. After Memphis became the new dynastic capital, many of Luxor’s temples declined in importance.

Constructed over hundreds of years by Amenhotep III, Ramses II, Tutankhamun, and other pharaohs, Luxor Temple was the largest and most significant religious center in ancient Egypt. In what was then Thebes, Luxor Temple was “the place of the First Occasion,” where the god Amon experienced a rebirth during the pharaoh’s annually reenacted coronation ceremony. Today remains of this vast complex include the colossal Great Colonnade Hall, almost 61 meters long, with 28 twenty-one-foot-high columns, its decoration largely undertaken by Tutankhamun around 1330 B.C. Many of the temple’s sidewalls were torn down after the time of the pharaohs and recycled for building materials.

Construction of the Avenue of Sphinxes began during the New Kingdom era. It was completed during the reign of 30th Dynasty ruler Nectanebo I (380-362 B.C.), but the road was buried under layers of sand over the centuries. The first trace of the avenue was found in 1949 when Egyptian archeologist Mohammed Zakaria Ghoneim discovered eight statues near the Luxor Temple, el-Sagheer said, with 17 more figures uncovered from 1958 to 1961 and 55 unearthed from 1961 to 1964 -- all within a perimeter of 250 meters. Egypt's government reopened the 3,000-year-old Avenue of Sphinxes in a grand, glitzy Luxor ceremony on 25th November 2021.

Our last stop is the Mosque of Abu Haggag. It is a mosque in Luxor, integrated into the structure of Luxor Temple, an Ancient Egyptian center of worship, making it one of the oldest continuously used temples in the world, dating back to the reign of Pharaoh Amenhotep III in the 14th century BC.