More on Luxor

Here is what our daily ship magazine had to say this evening about Luxor:

“The Valley of the Kings is a valley in Egypt where for a period of nearly 500 years from the 16th to 11th century BC, tombs were constructed for the kings and powerful nobles of the New Kingdom (the Eighteenth through Twentieth Dynasties of Ancient Egypt. The valley stands on the west bank of the Nile, across from Thebes (modern Luxor), within the heart of the Theban Necropolis. The wadi consists of two valleys, East Valley (where the majority of the royal tombs are situated) and West Valley. The Egyptian belief that “To speak the name of the dead is to make him live again” is certainly carried out in the building of the tombs. The king’s formal names and titles are inscribed in his tomb anlong with his images and statues. The text in the tombs are from the Book of the Dead, the book of the Gates and the Book of the Underworld.”
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Our port lecturer is an archeologist and Egyptologist. He says that they have recently discovered a major find that could rival the finding of King Tut’s tomb. This is not yet publically announced, so we’ll see how this plays out over the next several months.

He also said that the modern technical tools predict that only about 1/3rd of all of the buried sites in Egypt have been uncovered so far. That means he says that for whatever we see over these two visits, some time in the near future, there will be three times that much uncovered eventually.
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Our tour meets tomorrow at 6:30 am and does not get back to the ship until 9:30 pm. The overland excursion meets at 6:15am and has an agenda that starts prior to 7:00 am for the next 3 days. There are some elderly people on the ship, but these excursion plans are certainly not for the medically challenged.