The West Bank of Luxor, known as Thebes to the ancient Egyptians, is home to some of Egypt's most spectacular monuments. The tombs of Tutankhamen and other pharaohs are hidden in its craggy valleys. Enormous funerary temple remains dot the land below.
Thousands of tourists visit these sites everyday, whisked through crash courses on Egyptian history as their buses speed from one site to another.
How to protect these visitors - and the precious foreign currency they represent - has been uppermost in the minds of the Egyptian authorities since Islamist militants began their violent campaign to overthrow the government in 1992.
They have spared no effort and expense in doing so. Most of the villagers who inhabit the area are peasant farmers who supplement their incomes by working for archaeological missions or on the fringes of the tourist industry. People are well aware of their dependence on tourism and militant Islam has not made the inroads here that it has in other poor Upper Egyptian communities.
Nevertheless, the authorities removed weapons from the village guards two years ago just to be sure.
Other, more elaborate security arrangements in place in Luxor for the past four years include a series of checkpoints on all roads leading into the area and frequent spot-checks on local inhabitants, armed police at all antiquities sites, plainclothes security officers lounging about temple entrances and police escorts for any tourists travelling on roads to other sites outside the area.
All this was beefed up still more for the gala performance last month of Verdi's opera, Aida, which used Hatshepsut's temple as a backdrop. The lavish performance was hailed by the Egyptian government as a sign that Egypt was a safe destination for tourists.
Although the militant violence began in the area just north of Luxor in 1992, this cordon sanitaire had never been penetrated by the radicals.
It is this, apart from the enormous loss of life, that makes yesterday's attack so shocking.
Reports from Luxor reveal fatal flaws in the security at Hatshepsut Temple. That the death toll was so much higher than the number of wounded is just one indication that the killers were able to complete their gruesome task virtually uninterrupted.
Some eyewitnesses said it took half-an-hour for police reinforcements to arrive and the policemen guarding the site were poorly armed and inexperienced, no match for well-armed zealots.
All this makes the killings highly embarrassing to the government, which has consistently treated militancy as a security issue, justifying its well-publicised disregard for human rights with the need for a strong response to terrorist violence. When the violence seemed to be abating earlier in the year, many accepted this justification.
But with yesterday's slaughter, coming only two months after the killing of nine Germans and an Egyptian in the name of Islam, not only has the security apparatus itself found to be flawed, its deployment in place of a rational policy towards a complex social and political movement has been shown to be inadequate.
The Guardian adds: Peaking in 1995 at a total of 343, the number killed in the battle with Islamic militants - terrorists, policemen, civilians - fell to 184 in 1996, and the decline continued this year.
For 14 months there was not a single act of violence in Cairo; but yesterday's attack was terror on a truly "Algerian" scale, by far the most devastating single attack of its kind since the insurgency began.