The historic city of Luxor contains some of Egypt's finest ancient monuments and is familiar to millions as a travel poster image of the country's tourist trade. From the vast wall carvings glorifying the conquests of the Pharaoh Ramses II to the scenes of the Winter Palace Hotel and the Temple of Karnak in the film Death on the Nile, images of Luxor are famous across the globe.
Luxor reached its pinnacle of glory during the New Empire (1580-1085 BC) when pharaohs of the 18th dynasty were taken by flurry of architectural enthusiasm, constructing some of the finest temples built in Egypt.
Queen Hatshepsut, daughter of Thothmes I and one of the few women pharaohs, had a temple built by the architect Senmut, bearing her name. It is perfectly proportioned, built on the borders of the "land of the dead", the burial grounds of the pharaohs on the west bank of the Nile.
The burial grounds are found in the barren Valleys of the Kings and the Queens where the pharaohs, their wives and their many children (Ramses II is reputed to have sired more than 90), were buried in sealed tombs, carved out of the rock and filled with extravagant riches.
Present plans to create the world's biggest open-air museum have run into difficulty because the 10,000 inhabitants of a nearby village, Gurna, are not keen to move to make space for the project.
It was in the Valley of the Kings that Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922, filled with a wealth of extravagant treasures which are now on display in the national museum in Cairo.
On the east bank of the Nile are the celebrated temples of Karnak and Luxor.
Karnak, with its hypostyle hall (a forest of huge sandstone columns), and its avenue of sphinxes, is one of the most impressive monuments in Luxor and promises to reveal a mountain of information to the archaeologists who have only analysed a fraction of the temple.
Luxor (formerly Thebes), comes from the Arab word El-Qusur, meaning palace or camp and is a magnet for Egyptian visitors as well as the millions of foreigners who flock to the country each year in search of culture as well as sunshine.
Tourism in Egypt took a plunge following a series of tourist murders in the early 1990s, but visitors are on the increase again, going up to 4.08 million between June 1996 and June 1997.