Who ruled Thebes?

Thebes, called Waset by the ancient Egyptians, stood on the Nile in Upper Egypt about 800 kilometres south of the Mediterranean, where the modern city of Luxor now lies. It was the capital of Egypt for long stretches of the Middle and New Kingdoms and, as the home of the god Amun, the most revered religious centre in the country for much of its history. Its temples on the east bank and royal tombs on the west bank make it one of the richest archaeological sites in the world.

People lived at Thebes from around 3200 BCE, but during the Old Kingdom it was a modest trading town and capital of the fourth province of Upper Egypt, while the kings ruled from Memphis. Its position gave it access to the gold and stone of the Eastern Desert and to the Wadi Hammamat route to the Red Sea. When royal authority broke down in the late third millennium BCE, a family of Theban princes, the Eleventh Dynasty, ruled the south in rivalry with kings based at Herakleopolis. Around 2050 BCE the Theban king Mentuhotep II defeated his rivals and reunited the country, beginning the Middle Kingdom. Deir el-Bahri's first mortuary temple was his work.

The Twelfth Dynasty moved the capital north again, but Thebes kept growing as the cult of its local god Amun spread across Egypt. The oldest remains of a temple to Amun at Karnak date from the reign of Senusret I, and by then the town covered roughly 250 hectares laid out on a grid.

When the Hyksos took Memphis around 1700 BCE, the Egyptian court retreated to Thebes, which became the capital once more. For a time Theban princes and Hyksos kings coexisted, but war broke out under Seqenenre Tao, who died in battle. His son Kamose and then Ahmose I fought on until Ahmose captured the Hyksos capital at Avaris and expelled them.

Under Ahmose and his successors of the New Kingdom, Thebes reached its height. Amun became the chief god of the state, and each king tried to outdo the last at Karnak, which was enlarged over some two thousand years. Hatshepsut revived trade with the land of Punt, and Thutmose III brought home plunder from as far as Mitanni. Amenhotep III built the Luxor temple, the avenue of sphinxes and a vast palace on the west bank, while the kings of this era were buried across the river in the Valley of the Kings. By 1500 BCE, in the estimate of the historian Ian Morris, Thebes may have been the largest city in the world, with perhaps 75,000 people.

Akhenaten abandoned Thebes, banned the worship of Amun and moved the court to his new city at Amarna, but after his death Tutankhamun restored the old gods and building resumed. In the Nineteenth Dynasty the government moved to the delta, yet Ramesses II still lived at Thebes for part of each year and added to Karnak and Luxor and built his own mortuary temple, the Ramesseum.

Under the later Ramesside kings Egypt's economy faltered. Workers at Deir el-Medina went on strike under Ramesses III, and around 1114 BCE investigations exposed widespread robbery of the royal tombs. During the Third Intermediate Period the high priests of Amun ruled the south almost independently of the kings in the delta. In the eighth century BCE the Kingdom of Kush extended its power over Upper Egypt, and the Kushite king Shabaka made Thebes his capital. The Assyrians ended this: after Tantamani's failed attempt to reconquer the north, Ashurbanipal's army took and plundered Thebes in the 660s BCE, carrying off its treasures to Nineveh; see the Assyrian conquest of Egypt.

Thebes never again held political power, though it remained a great religious centre under the Saite kings and the Persians. Alexander the Great visited during the Opet festival, but under the Ptolemies the city became a centre of revolt, supporting rebel kings in Upper Egypt until 185 BCE and rising again in 132 and 91 BCE, after which it was subdued and left in ruins. Under Roman rule its people clustered around the Luxor temple, where a legion was later based, and in the first century CE the geographer Strabo described it as a mere village. In 1979 UNESCO listed ancient Thebes and its necropolis as a World Heritage Site.