Luxor Temple
Luxor, Egypt
The temple at the heart of Luxor city, built by Amenhotep III and Ramesses II and used continuously for worship for four thousand years, from the Opet festival to the mosque built into its walls.
Luxor Temple stands in the middle of the modern city of Luxor, its colonnade and obelisk rising beside the Nile's east bank, and it is the ancient Egyptian temple with the longest continuous religious use: built by Amenhotep III and expanded by Ramesses II, it hosted the Opet festival's annual renewal of the king's divine authority, was converted to a church under the Romans, was buried in silt under the medieval town, and had a mosque built into its walls, which still stands there.
Excavation and restoration over the last century have uncovered the avenue of sphinxes connecting it to Karnak two miles north, and the temple's reliefs and shrines are among the best-preserved in Egypt. The mosque's survival inside the temple is the honest detail: the site has never stopped being sacred to someone, and the layers have been kept rather than removed.
Visiting
The Egyptian Ministry of Tourism's monument pages carry hours and the current ticket; Luxor Temple sits in the city center, open into the evening and beautifully lit.
Photo: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Luxor_Temple), CC BY-SA 4.0.
Associated traditions & practices
Traditions from this region
Traditions historically rooted in this region — offered as background context, not as a claim about this particular place.
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