Luxor Museum Tours & Tickets

Luxor Museum is the argument against big museums. It sits on the Corniche between Luxor Temple and Karnak, it is small enough to see properly in ninety minutes, and it is curated with a restraint that is rare anywhere and almost unknown in Egypt: dark walls, focused lighting, generous space around each object, and labels that tell you what you are looking at.

Anyone who has come from the old Egyptian Museum in Cairo, with its crowded galleries and handwritten cards, will feel the difference within a minute. Fewer objects, better shown.

The cachette

The heart of the collection came out of a hole in the ground at Luxor Temple in 1989. Workers found a cache of statues buried in the temple's court, hidden at some point in antiquity when the building was being cleared, and the quality is extraordinary: near-perfect hard-stone sculpture that had been sealed away from weather and iconoclasm for two thousand years.

The standing figure of Amenhotep III in quartzite, with its polished surface and its faint smile, is the single best thing in the building and among the finest Egyptian sculptures anywhere. It repays standing in front of for a while.

The Akhenaten wall

At the top of the building is something you cannot see anywhere else: a reconstructed wall from a dismantled temple of Akhenaten.

When Akhenaten's religious revolution was reversed, his buildings at Karnak were taken apart and the blocks, called talatat, were reused as rubble inside later pylons. Thousands of them were recovered when those pylons were restored. Here a large section has been reassembled into a continuous painted wall, showing the heretic king's radically different art style: long faces, distended bodies, informal domestic scenes under the rays of the sun disc.

It is the best single explanation of the Amarna period on public display, and it works because you see the scale and the strangeness together.

The mummies

Two royal mummies are displayed, in a dim room with minimal ceremony, one of them Ahmose I, who expelled the Hyksos and founded the New Kingdom, and the other probably Ramesses I.

Whether you want to look at them is a personal matter, and the museum handles the question better than most by giving them a quiet space rather than a spotlight.

Practical notes

The museum opens in the evening as well as during the day, which makes it the best available answer to the Luxor afternoon. From roughly one o'clock to late afternoon the temples are punishing and the tombs are closed or crowded, and an air-conditioned, beautifully lit museum is exactly what the day needs.

Ninety minutes is right. Two hours if you linger over the cachette statues. There is a separate charge for photography.

Combine it with an evening visit to Luxor Temple, which is a short walk along the Corniche and is also at its best after dark.

Is Luxor Museum worth visiting?

Yes, and it is among the most consistently underrated stops in Egypt. Visitors tend to arrive with a fixed idea that museums are the Cairo experience and temples are the Luxor experience, and skip it.

If you have any interest in Egyptian sculpture as sculpture rather than as archaeology, this is the best-presented collection in the country, and it takes an afternoon that would otherwise be spent waiting for the heat to pass.