Last Updated: October 28, 2026
Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid. Keep that in mind on the Nile, because most of the temples you sail past are from her end of the story, not the beginning. Dendera, Kom Ombo, Philae and Esna were built or finished under the Ptolemies, the Greek dynasty that ruled Egypt after Alexander the Great, and under the Roman emperors who came after them. Foreign kings had themselves carved into the walls in the crowns and kilts of the pharaohs, making offerings to Egyptian gods in a style that was already ancient, because that was what a ruler of Egypt was supposed to look like. Alexander himself is there inside Luxor Temple, in a chapel built in his name, dressed as one.
We came to Egypt in late fall, after a pre-cruise extension in Jordan — Amman and Jerash, Madaba, Mount Nebo and the Dead Sea, the desert at Wadi Rum and Petra, all gathered in our Jordan Travel Guide — and a short flight from Amman to Cairo. We spent four nights in Cairo, split between the start and the end of the trip, flew to Luxor, and boarded Uniworld’s River Tosca for the cruise from Luxor up the Nile to Aswan and back, with a flight south to Abu Simbel. By the time we left we had made some very good friends after three weeks of traveling together.
Three other things kept surfacing across the ten posts. The first is erasure: faces chiseled off, names hammered out of cartouches, a pharaoh’s whole reign cut from the record by the one who came next. The second is color. Egypt was not built in beige; it was painted, and at Dendera and Esna you can see it again, because cleaning has taken the soot of centuries off ceilings that were blue and gold all along. The third is that some of the most famous monuments on the river are no longer where they were built. Abu Simbel and Philae were cut into blocks and moved to higher ground in the 1960s and 1970s, ahead of the water rising behind the Aswan High Dam.
This guide is organized by region, from Cairo south up the Nile to Abu Simbel near the Sudanese border, rather than strictly in the order we traveled. Each section links to the full post, with the photographs, visitor information and practical detail for that part of the trip.
