Thebes rose on the worship of a single god. Amun began as a local Theban deity and ascended, as the city's fortunes rose, to become the supreme god of the Egyptian state. Every dynasty that ruled from here tried to outbuild the last in his honor. The Karnak temple complex grew over centuries into one of the largest religious structures ever raised by human hands, its great hypostyle hall a forest of stone columns tall enough to dwarf anyone who walks beneath them. From the end of the New Kingdom, the city was known simply as "the City of Amun." That name traveled. It appears in the Hebrew Bible, in the books of Nahum, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah, as No-Amon, a distant great city whose fate served as a warning to others.

Thebes did not begin as a capital. In the Old Kingdom it was a modest trading post while Memphis, far to the north, held the court. Its rise came through war. When the kingdom fractured during the First Intermediate Period, a line of Theban princes fought their way back to dominance, and around 2000 BC Mentuhotep II reunited Egypt from here, opening the Middle Kingdom. Centuries later the city did it again. After foreign Hyksos rulers seized the Delta, the kings of Thebes drove them out under Ahmose I and founded the New Kingdom, Egypt's imperial golden age. As capital of the Eighteenth Dynasty, Thebes drew tribute and talent from Nubia to the Levant, and grew, by some estimates, into the largest city in the world around 1500 BC, with perhaps seventy-five thousand people.

To live in ancient Thebes was to live by a calendar of processions. The city celebrated more than sixty festivals a year. The greatest was the Beautiful Feast of Opet, when the statue of Amun journeyed from Karnak to Luxor temple in a riot of music, dancing, and crowds, renewing the bond between the god and the living king. Another, the Beautiful Festival of the Valley, carried Amun across the Nile to visit the dead among the western tombs, a day for families to feast at the graves of their ancestors, somewhere between a religious rite and a remembrance. Between the temples on the two banks ran the Avenue of the Sphinxes, a ceremonial road lined with ram-headed statues, along which the gods made their slow, glittering way.

No city stays at the summit forever. Under the later Ramessid kings, around 1100 BC, Thebes slid into economic crisis. Workers at the royal tomb-builders' village of Deir el-Medina staged what may be history's first recorded labor strike, downing tools when their rations failed to arrive. Worse, the royal necropolis itself was being looted; investigations exposed corruption among the very officials meant to guard it, and the priests of Amun were eventually forced to gather the violated mummies of the pharaohs and hide them. In 663 BC the Assyrians sacked the city outright. Their king Ashurbanipal boasted of carrying off its silver, gold, and "two obelisks of splendid electrum." Thebes never recovered its political weight, though it remained a holy place. By the first century AD the geographer Strabo found it reduced to a scattering of villages.

Yet the ruin is magnificent. The stone the Thebans raised to their gods and kings was built to last, and much of it has. Karnak and Luxor temples still stand on the east bank; the Valley of the Kings, the mortuary temples, and the painted tombs spread across the west. UNESCO named ancient Thebes and its necropolis a World Heritage Site in 1979. Walk the Avenue of the Sphinxes today, restored and reopened, or stand in the hypostyle hall at Karnak as the light slants between the columns, and Homer's "hundred-gated" hyperbole stops feeling like an exaggeration. The city that crowned and buried the pharaohs is gone as a living capital, but as a monument to what Egypt was at its height, nowhere on the Nile speaks louder.