Em hotep, distinguished guests of Pharaoh. Di ankh Re mi djet! May you be given life, like Re, eternally. Welcome to the Two Lands. My name is Sankh-Ka-Re Thutmose. My fellow tour guides are nilaja Amenhotep, Lotus Horemheb, and Khnemu Mentuhotep, but by luck of the draw, you are stuck with me. I shall do my utmost to be worthy of the trust placed in me.
We stand in the middle of Waset, the Greatest City in the Ancient Worlds — well, in my opinion, anyway. You probably have your own favourite. This is the City of Pharaoh, the City of Amun, capital of Kmt for over a thousand years. The Greek poet Homer described it as "The hundred-gated Thebes" and swore that "only the grains of sand of the desert surpassed the quantity of riches enclosed within" its walls. The Copts called it Tapé, which for the Greeks became Thebai — or the Thebes of which you've all heard stories. Its modern world name of Luxor derives from the Arabic 'Al-uqsur', which is the plural of el-qasr meaning fortification. And that came from the Roman word 'castra'. In their day, the Romans maintained two camps inside Waset's walls. We were very popular with the Romans . . . or maybe they just don't trust us.
At any rate, here in Kmt, the capital is known as Wst (Waset), 'the dominant' or simply Nywt (Niut), 'the City' — that's city with a capital "C". In ancient times, the population here was an unprecedented and astonishing one million.