Sixty-three tombs have been catalogued in the Valley of the Kings, and the last major one was found in 1922. Howard Carter's discovery of Tutankhamun's burial chamber ended a century of rumour that the wadi had been emptied. It had not. Fragments still surface in the limestone debris. The valley sits on the west bank of the Nile, beneath a pyramid-shaped peak the ancient Egyptians called Ta-Dehent. That silhouette was the point. After the Old Kingdom, pharaohs abandoned above-ground pyramids and cut their tombs into rock instead, hoping concealment would defeat the robbers. It did not. Nearly every chamber was stripped in antiquity. What survived was the decoration — and the decoration is the reason the site matters. Painted plaster and carved relief cover corridor after corridor with the Book of Gates, the Amduat and the Litany of Re, texts that map the sun god's twelve-hour passage through the underworld. The pigments are original. Little has been repainted. Travellers arriving on a hurghada to luxor day trip by plane are looking at colour applied more than three thousand years ago. Thebes, the city these kings ruled from, lay across the water. Karnak and Luxor Temple anchored the east bank of the living; the necropolis and the mortuary temples — Hatshepsut's terraces at Deir el-Bahari, the Ramesseum, Medinet Habu — held the west bank of the dead. The Colossi of Memnon still mark the approach road. UNESCO inscribed the whole of ancient Thebes in 1979. Architecturally the tombs follow a grammar. A descending corridor, a well shaft meant to trap floodwater and thieves, a pillared hall, then the burial chamber with its sunken sarcophagus emplacement. KV17, cut for Seti I, runs more than 130 metres into the hillside and remains the longest. KV5, re-identified in the 1990s, holds over 120 chambers built for the sons of Ramesses II. KV62 — Tutankhamun's — is small, hastily finished, and famous only by accident of survival. Rotation is now standard practice. Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities closes and reopens tombs to manage humidity from visitor breath, which condenses on painted walls and lifts pigment. The general foreign-adult entrance fee is 750 EGP and includes three tombs; which three depends on the rotation in force. Operators running luxor valley of the kings day tour itineraries build around that schedule, and a well-planned hurghada to luxor day trip by plane simply follows what the inspectorate has opened that morning.