The only witness in Luxor to its glorious past is the temple which the ancient Egyptians erected to the glory of Amon-Ra, king of the gods, and which they called by the name of "southern harem of Amon". Luxor Temple is among the most beautiful Temples in Egypt located on the East bank of the River Nile in Luxor.
Uncovered in 1883 by Gaston Maspero, the temple is 260 meters long, and was mostly built by two pharaohs, Amenophis III, who began it around 1400 BC, and Ramses II who finished it, adding the great porticoed court with the axis shifted eastwards.
Horemheb and Tutankhamun added columns, statues, and friezes and Akhenaten had earlier obliterated his father's cartouches and installed a shrine to the Aten but the only major expansion effort took place under Ramesses II. Numerous other sovereigns, including Alexander the Great, enriched it with relief, inscriptions and minor buildings.
The temple of Luxor was joined to that of Karnak by a long dromos paved in stone, a processional avenue, flanked by human-headed sphinxes. This street has not yet been completely brought to light and work is still going on. The avenue ended at the entrance to the temple of Luxor, marked by the great pylon raised by Ramses II, with a facade of all of 65 meters and which is decorated with bas-reliefs which illustrate scenes of the pharaoh's military campaigns against the Hittites.
On the left side the Egyptian camp, the war council; on the right side the battle of Kadesh. Below, in vertical bands, the so-called "poem of Pentaur" which celebrates the pharaoh's courage, is inscribed in hieroglyphs. The four large vertical slits on the facade were meant to hold the flagstaffs.
Originally the pylon was preceded by two obelisks, by two seated colossi and four standing colossi. Today, only the left obelisk, 25 meters high, is still there. The other one was taken to Paris in 1833 and erected by the engineer Lebas in Place de la Concorde on October 25, 1836.
The two granite colossi represent the pharaoh seated on a throne, fifteen and a half meters high on a base about a meter high. Of the other four statues in pink granite, set against the pylon, one represented the queen Nefertari and another, on the right and in poor condition, the daughter Merit Amon.