قصر الملقطة

Scattered across the desert edge of Luxor's West Bank lie the mud-brick remains of Malkata, the sprawling ceremonial palace-city built by Amenhotep III, one of the richest and most powerful pharaohs of the New Kingdom. In its heyday over 3,000 years ago this was a small city in its own right, with royal apartments, halls, a temple, workshops, housing for officials and a vast ceremonial harbour dug from the desert.

What survives today is low and ruined, faint outlines of walls and floors where painted pavements once dazzled with scenes of nature. It takes imagination to reconstruct the splendour, but that is the appeal: this is an off-the-map site with no crowds, where you sense the ambition of Egypt at its cultural peak far from the ticket queues.