Luxor Museum & Mummification Museum Half Day

After a few days of vast temples, Luxor's two museums come as a pleasure: compact, well lit and cool. We pick you up from your hotel and drive along the Corniche to the Luxor Museum, where your Egyptologist guide walks you through some of the finest sculpture ever found in the city.

Highlights include the statues discovered buried beneath Luxor Temple in 1989, carved with a crispness photographs never quite capture, and two royal mummies thought to be Ahmose I, who drove the Hyksos out of Egypt, and Ramses I, founder of the dynasty of Ramses II.

A short way along the river, the Mummification Museum explains how the Egyptians preserved their dead: the tools, resins and linen, the canopic jars that held the organs, and mummified animals from cats to crocodiles. The tour takes about four hours, and you're back at your hotel afterwards.