Karnak is the largest religious complex ever built, its construction spanning over 2,000 years as pharaoh after pharaoh added temples, pylons, and obelisks to honor Amun. The Hypostyle Hall alone contains 134 columns, the largest reaching 21 meters high, the scale creating space that overwhelms before impressing. The temple was ancient Egypt's most important religious site, the priests who served Amun holding power that rivaled pharaohs.

The sound and light show that Karnak offers nightly dramatizes what day visits cannot - the history layered across millennia, the builders whose names inscriptions preserve, the gods who are gone but whose temples remain. Karnak is best visited early morning before crowds and heat, the scale appreciated in relative solitude, the details examined before exhaustion sets in. The temple is inexhaustible; the visitors are not.

The Valley of the Kings holds 63 known tombs, the pharaohs of the New Kingdom having chosen this remote valley to protect burials that pyramids had failed to safeguard. The protection failed - all tombs but one were looted in antiquity - but the decorated walls survived, the paintings and hieroglyphics that guided pharaohs through the afterlife preserved by the dry climate. The tombs that visitors enter are rotated to limit damage; the most famous, Tutankhamun's, is least impressive, its small size reflecting his minor reign.

The valley is lunar landscape, the bare hills hiding what centuries of excavation have revealed. The tombs descend into rock, their corridors and chambers painted with scenes of the underworld, the gods and demons that the dead would encounter, the spells that would guide them safely. The Valley of the Kings is where pharaohs intended to rest forever; their failure to do so is archaeology's gain.

Luxor Temple sits in the modern city's heart, its avenue of sphinxes recently reconnected to Karnak three kilometers north. The temple was dedicated to Amun, Mut, and Khonsu, the divine family of Thebes, its construction primarily the work of Amenhotep III and Ramesses II. The mosque that sits atop one of the temple's courts was built before excavation revealed what lay beneath, the layers of occupation visible in architecture's stratigraphy.

The temple is best seen at night when illumination reveals what daylight flattens. The obelisk that once had a twin now standing in Paris's Place de la Concorde, the colossi of Ramesses that flank the entrance, the colonnade whose proportions please without explanation - Luxor Temple is more intimate than Karnak, more accessible to appreciation. The temple sits amid modern traffic, the ancient persisting surrounded by the contemporary.

The Nile's west bank was where ancient Egyptians placed their dead, the setting sun symbolizing the journey to the afterlife. The mortuary temples that pharaohs built there - Hatshepsut's terraced temple, the Ramesseum, Medinet Habu - served the cult of dead kings, the priests who maintained worship funded by estates whose income death did not end. The Colossi of Memnon that once guarded Amenhotep III's temple now stand alone, the temple destroyed, the statues inexplicably surviving.

The west bank requires a day that few visitors give it. The Valley of the Kings, the Valley of the Queens, the nobles' tombs, the workers' village of Deir el-Medina, the mortuary temples - these spread across kilometers of desert that heat makes exhausting. The bicycle rentals and hired cars that provide transport cover distance; the time that appreciation requires cannot be purchased.

The Nile at Luxor flows as it has for millennia, the feluccas that sail its surface using winds and currents that ancient boats used. The cruise ships that dock at Luxor bring tourists from Aswan; the smaller boats offer sunset sails that provide the perspective that temples on shore reward. The Nile is Luxor's reason for being, the water that made Thebes possible, the transportation that moved the stones from which temples were built.

The felucca sail is obligatory tourism, the experience of wind-powered travel on water that civilization first arose beside. The agricultural green that lines the river gives way to desert immediately behind; the contrast that made Egypt 'the gift of the Nile' is nowhere more visible. Luxor from the water shows what made it great - the temples rising above palm trees, the west bank's bare hills holding the hidden dead, the river connecting everything.