Between 1539 and 1078 B.C. practically all pharaohs were buried in the Valley of the Kings. Most tombs had been ransacked by the time archaeologists began excavating in the early 1800s, but so many tombs, temples, shrines, and other ruins blanket Luxor that Egyptologists have been kept busy here for two centuries.

(Text adapted from and photograph shot on assignment for, but not published in, "Valley of the Kings," September 1998, National Geographic magazine)