Luxor Temple stands on the Nile's east bank within the ancient city of Thebes. Its orientation towards Karnak reflects the close ceremonial relationship between the two sanctuaries. The processional route connected divine houses rather than merely linking neighbouring monuments. At Opet, the cult images of Amun, Mut and Khonsu travelled south from Karnak to the sanctuary of Amun in his Luxor form, Amenemopet. The ancient name Ipet-resyt identifies this southern sacred place. The modern name Luxor comes from Arabic al-Uqsur, the Palaces, but that later name should not be treated as the original Egyptian title of the temple.

Amenhotep III built the principal core in the fourteenth century BCE, although earlier sacred structures also existed at the site. His courts and inner rooms created a sequence of increasingly restricted spaces. The divine-birth scenes presented Amun-Ra as the king's father, appearing in the form of the human king Thutmose IV. Such scenes expressed royal theology and legitimacy; they were not a historical account of a supernatural event. The great processional colonnade contains fourteen columns arranged in two rows. Its important Opet reliefs belong to work completed under Tutankhamun and Horemheb, a distinction that separates the construction of the hall from the decoration preserved on its walls.

Ramesses II transformed the approach. His additions included a large forecourt, a monumental pylon and colossal royal statues, announcing his presence before a visitor reached the older temple. Two granite obelisks once stood before the entrance. One remains associated with the temple's familiar facade; the other was transported to France and erected in the Place de la Concorde in 1836. The surviving monument and the distant one belong to the same original entrance programme, but their later histories took very different paths. Together they show how royal monuments could become diplomatic gifts and landmarks far from the sacred setting for which they were made.

During Opet, the temple formed part of a larger festival landscape. Priests carried sacred barques, and river vessels also transported the divine images between the sanctuaries. The colonnade reliefs record movement, offerings, musicians and ceremonial activity. The festival linked the gods' presence with the renewal of royal authority, while the processions brought aspects of temple religion into public view. That public celebration did not mean that every participant could enter the innermost rooms. Nor should the sanctuary be imagined as an empty holiday residence abandoned between festivals. It belonged to an established cult with its own spaces, personnel and continuing religious functions.

Later rulers left new layers. A barque shrine bears the name and images of Alexander the Great, presenting the Macedonian ruler in the religious language of Egyptian kingship. The building work does not by itself establish that Alexander personally visited the temple. In the late third century CE, the Roman military established a fort around the complex. An interior room was adapted for imperial worship, with painted decoration over earlier Egyptian reliefs. This was centuries after Rome first took control of Egypt, not a transformation made immediately at the conquest. The images of emperors occupied a place where royal legitimacy had already been expressed for many generations.

Christian occupation and the later mosque of Abu Haggag added further chapters. Buildings and accumulated deposits rose around and within the temple, leaving ancient features partly buried beneath later ground levels. The elevated position of the mosque preserves a visible reminder of this changing landscape. Nineteenth-century clearance exposed areas that had been incorporated into the town; the temple had neither disappeared completely nor remained entirely unburied. Its significance lies in those layers of use and rediscovery. Ancient columns, imperial paintings and later places of worship reveal a history of adaptation, in which continuity of place coexisted with profound changes in belief.