Luxor

Előszó

LUXOR
A strip of green in the middle of the desert, tilled fields and in the background the red rocks of the "Libyan chain". Here lies Luxor, one of the great est capitals of the ancient world. Charming and evocative, with the Nile banks lined with modern hotels, the feluccas that sail along the quiet waters of the river, the small, silent Streets of the Bazaar that come to life in the evening with their colours, sounds and lights.
This is the great, ancient city of Thebes, capital of the Egyptian empire for almost one thousand years, which Homer referred to in the IXcanto of the Iliad as "Thebes with one hundred gates" and for which "only the grains of sand in the desert surpassed the abundance of wealth contained therein". The Copts called it Tapé, hence the Greek Thebai, but for Egyptian inhabitants it was Uaset, meaning "the chief town" and Niut, "the City"; it was later on called Diospolis Magna. Its present name of Luxor comes from the Arab El Qousoür, translation of the Latin "castra" with which the ancient Romans indi-cated the city where they had installed two encampments.
In the Memphis era it was a small village where the God of War Montu was worshipped and its temples marked the boundaries of the territory. As from the X
Dynasty, thanks to its geographicalposition andpolitical grounds, its importance started to increase considerably until the military successes of its princes made it a great power. Capital of the pharaohs of the New Empire, the god Amon was worshipped in great splendour in the triad in Mut and Khonsu. It was the age of great victories and triumph in Asia Minor, Nubia and Libya. It was a happy period - perhaps the happiest in Egyptian history - and Thebes had no rivals: victorious Pharaohs accumulated incredible wealth there ("city where the houses are rich in treasure") from war booty; from the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and even from the Sahara - across the road of the oases - merchants arrived to grow rich and to enrich the townsmen of Thebes who reached the incredible figure of half a millión!
On the east bank rise the temples in which the gods dwelt whereas on the west bünk buildings were con-structed for the worship of dead sovereigns; apart from this theory of temples, parallel to the river runs the heavy rock curtain that conceals the Valley of the Kings. Thebes then inexorably feli The very geographical position that one thousand years beforehand had favoured the birth of its power now became the main reason for its
A fe/ucca, a tourist boát sailing up the Nile and, in the background the rugged mountains of the Valley of the Kings. Vissza