I was tempted to think that nothing ever changes in Luxor. Temples and tombs survive; boats sail on the Nile; the fellahin, Egypt's farmers, still irrigate their crops with rainwater from Ethiopia and Uganda; and the sun, the valley and nearby desert remain the defining facts of life, just as they were in the paintings in the pharaohs' tombs. But I was wrong. Luxor is being transformed.
The city is cut into two distinctive halves by the Nile, which is broad and beautiful here. At the time of the pharaohs, the east bank was busy, a place for the living, while the west side was as quiet as the occupants of the tombs hidden in its Theban hills. And that's the way it is today: the city, the airport, the train station and two big temples on one side; the tombs and temples, the Theban hills, some villages and farmland on the other.
Yet, in the couple of years since Dr Samir Farag became governor, Luxor has gone through enormous change. On the eastern side of the river, he has renovated the train station, demolished the restaurants and souvenir stalls that blocked the view of Luxor and Karnak temples, and rebuilt the souk. He is enlarging the airport and moving all "floating hotels" several miles upstream; he has opened a Nubian cultural centre, a branch of Cairo's Mubarak Public Library . . . and all this is just the beginning. No wonder some inhabitants are quaking at the thought of what is to come.
The largest and most impressive of all Luxor's many antiquities is Karnak temple, on the east bank. It is also the most confusing, because every pharaoh who wanted to be remembered had to make his mark here - and all of them did. The result has been to leave the place without any obvious rationale. As you walk from court to chapel, from obelisk to colossal statue, you gawp at the scale and beauty, but struggle to understand the ground plan.
Only in the grand hypostyle hall does the place come perfectly into focus. This vast space, one of the largest religious structures ever built, is filled with 134 stone columns, 75ft high, representing papyrus plants. Egyptians believed that the world was created when land rose out of the waters of chaos. For a few weeks during the Nile's annual summer flood, the floor of this hall was underwater, giving the impression that the papyrus columns had come to life.
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For all the talk of the gods Amun and Osiris, for all the beauty of the temple carvings, the majesty of the pharaohs' statues, the pure wonder of obelisks, it was this symbolic reenactment of the world's creation, so simple, so fundamental, that transported me into the past. But in Luxor, one is constantly pulled between ancient and modern, so, at the temple gate, I was jolted back to the 21st century by the sight of Governor Farag's men knocking down the 19th-century headquarters of French archeologists. The work was proceeding at such a pace that entire rooms had disappeared while I was in the temple.
The reason for all this change? Tourism. If Luxor's transformation can be pinned to one moment, it was the opening, in 2005, of a bridge across the Nile. Until then, the city's halves were joined by ferries, a journey that brought to mind the myth of the boatman Charon, who rowed the dead across to the world of shadows. But the ferries could not cope with the growing number of buses: as many as 8,000 day-trippers arrive each morning from the Red Sea coast.
So it was decided to build a bridge 10 miles south of town. International consultants and local archeologists warned that the bridge would threaten the west bank by bringing too much traffic to its roads, too many visitors to the tombs, and by encouraging locals to build on farmland. The bridge was built, and the prophecy has been fulfilled, though not all of it is bad. Among the dozens of new hotels and apartment buildings constructed on the west bank since the bridge was opened, a few, such as the budget Nour el Gourna and the top-end Al Moudira, have become an asset to their community.
The west bank, in particular the Valley of the Kings, is Luxor's real crowd-puller. Most of us go to see the tombs of Tutankhamun and Egypt's other famous rulers, and it is the tomb walls and the stories of hidden gold and cursing mummies that most of us remember clearly. To help us visit this place, Governor Farag is turning the west bank into an open-air museum, a process that involves moving - or removing - thousands of Egyptians and improving access to some of the monuments.
The pharaohs' tombs all lie in the Theban hills, a limestone range running south-north like the Nile. Beyond the hills, to the west, lies the desert. To the east, a fertile plain stretches to the river, adding brilliant greens to the blue of the sky and the yellow-white of the hills and desert. Pharaohs built funerary temples along the base of the hills, and in ancient times, priests, workers, farmers and guardians lived here. More recently, there have also been guides, souvenir-sellers and others who live off tourism.
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There have always been stories of tomb robbers, even in antiquity, but more recently water became the pressing issue - household waste water, leaking into the hillside and threatening tombs. Governor Farag insisted that the villagers had to move to a new breeze-block village a few miles north. All but four of the mud-brick houses, some of them 200 years old, have since been bulldozed.
I walked up to the remaining houses on the last evening of my visit to Luxor. There was no escaping the change overtaking the place. Some of it - the clearing of buildings around Luxor temple, for instance, and the opening of cafes and bars along the waterfront by the Old Winter Palace Hotel - seems like a good idea. But not everything is an unequivocal success: the new bridge over the Nile has led to a surge in tourism in Luxor, compromising the fragile antiquities of the west bank. And nobody walking through the ruins of Qurna, as I did that last evening, could fail to feel sad at the destruction of such an extraordinary and history-laden village.
As I sat on the threshold of one of the surviving homes, my back to the Theban hills, long shadows began to spread over Ramses II's temple and the fields beyond it, dogs barked in the Valley of the Kings, calls to prayer spread along the valley, swallows played overhead and the last of the villagers settled down to share stories and complain about their rulers. Much has changed in Luxor, but some things, it seems, will always stay the same.
Anthony Sattin travelled as a guest of Abercrombie & Kent
Travel details: Abercrombie & Kent (0845 070 0612, www.abercrombiekent.co.uk ) has three nights, B&B, at the Old Winter Palace Hotel, in Luxor, with a night in Cairo in each direction, from £1,169pp, including British Airways flights from Heathrow, EgyptAir connections to Luxor and transfers. A similar package, staying at the Al Moudira, on the west bank, starts at £998pp. Or try Hayes & Jarvis (0870 850 3565, www.hayesandjarvis.co.uk ) or Soliman Travel (0870 027 5230, www.solimantravel.co.uk ).