 | We move along now to Luxor which is situated on the Nile, 400 miles to the south of Cairo. Luxor is the modern name for the ancient city of Thebes. For the interested visitor there are more ancient sites to visit here than anywhere else in Egypt (and probably the world). You may have seen this sitting figure of Rameses the second when it featured on a Benson and Hedges advert a few years ago with a toilet roll hanging from the pillar on his right. This statue is in the Luxor temple which is bang in the centre of the town and likely to be your first port of call if you ever go there. There is a mosque in the middle of the temple which was built when the site was covered over in sand about 200 years ago and the natives did not realise what was hidden underneath. Most of Egypt's ancient sites were hidden in this way until western archaeologists uncovered them in the 19th. century. |
