This Luxor Museum and Mummification Museum tour takes you to the two museums on Luxor’s Corniche in a single morning: the Luxor Museum, with some of the finest statues ever found at Thebes and the mummies of two pharaohs, and the Mummification Museum, which shows how the ancient Egyptians prepared their dead for eternity. It is a private tour with your own licensed Egyptologist guide, air-conditioned transport from your hotel or Nile cruise ship, and entrance fees included, from $40 per person.
The tour takes 3 to 4 hours, runs every day, and is easy to fit around a cruise schedule or a day on the West Bank.
At Karnak, Luxor Temple and the Valley of the Kings you see the buildings and the tombs, but most of what once stood inside them has gone: the statues, the furniture, the bodies of the kings. Many of those objects ended up a short drive away, in two small museums on the Nile.
The Luxor Museum is quiet, beautifully lit and never crowded, and it holds pieces that would be the stars of any collection in the world: statues from the Luxor Cache, buried in Luxor Temple in ancient times and discovered only in 1989, objects from the tomb of Tutankhamun, and the mummies of Ahmose I, who drove the Hyksos out of Egypt, and the king thought to be Ramesses I. The Mummification Museum then answers the question every visitor asks in the Valley of the Kings: how exactly was a body turned into a mummy? With an Egyptologist beside you, the two visits make sense of everything else you see in Luxor.
Your Egyptologist guide meets you in the lobby of your East Bank hotel or at the reception of your cruise ship, and you drive along the Corniche to the Luxor Museum, a few minutes away.
Opened in 1975 on the riverbank between Luxor Temple and Karnak, the museum displays objects from the temples and tombs of ancient Thebes, from the end of the Old Kingdom to the Islamic period. Your guide takes you through the main gallery, with its statues of Thutmose III and Amenhotep III and the double statue of Sobek and Amenhotep III, carved in calcite. Upstairs are smaller treasures, among them objects from Tutankhamun’s tomb, and the Talatat Wall, rebuilt from hundreds of decorated sandstone blocks from Akhenaten’s temple at Karnak, showing daily life at the time of the heretic king.
In the newer wing you see the royal mummies of Ahmose I and the king believed to be Ramesses I, whose mummy was returned to Egypt in 2003 after more than a century abroad, and the hall built for the statues of the Luxor Cache.
A short drive south along the Corniche brings you to the Mummification Museum, opposite Luxor Temple. Opened in 1997, it explains the 70-day process of embalming step by step: removing the organs and storing them in canopic jars, drying the body in natron, then wrapping it in linen with amulets and spells. You see the tools and materials the embalmers used, decorated coffins, the mummy of a high priest of Amun, and mummified animals, from cats to a crocodile, offered to the gods.
You are driven back to your hotel or cruise ship in time for lunch, with the afternoon free.
| Number of travellers | Price per person |
|---|---|
| 1 person | $100 |
| 2 people | $60 |
| 3 to 7 people | $50 |
| 8 to 16 people | $40 |
Every booking is a private tour for your own party, so the price per person falls as your group grows. Children under 6 travel free, children from 6 to 11 pay 50%, and from 12 years they pay the adult price. Prices are in US dollars and include entrance fees to both museums.
The museums sit on the East Bank, so they pair naturally with the Karnak and Luxor Temple half-day tour: see the temples first, then the statues and objects that were found inside them. If you have more time, cross the river for the Valley of the Kings, Hatshepsut Temple and Colossi of Memnon tour, finish the day with a felucca ride to Banana Island at sunset, or return to Karnak after dark for the Karnak sound and light show. All of our Luxor day tours can be combined into one private plan.
