Seven days: three nights in Cairo for Giza and the Egyptian Museum, then three nights on a five-star boat from Aswan to Luxor, all privately guided.
A representative meets you inside Cairo International Airport, handles the arrival formalities and takes you to your hotel in a private air-conditioned vehicle. Nothing is scheduled afterwards, which is the right call on a first day in Egypt.
The Giza plateau after breakfast, with your guide: the pyramids of Cheops, Chephren and Mykerinos, then the Great Sphinx and the Valley Temple beside it, which is the piece most visitors walk past and the one that best shows how the funerary complexes actually worked. Lunch at an Egyptian restaurant, then the Egyptian Museum in the afternoon, whose collection is among the richest anywhere and whose Tutankhamun rooms are the reason most people come.
A morning flight south from Cairo. Aswan is gentler than the capital in every sense, and the first two stops set the tone: the Temple of Philae, built for Isis on its island, and the High Dam, which is the reason the temple had to be moved there at all. You board the boat afterwards and eat lunch on deck while it sits at its mooring.
Sailing north. Kom Ombo comes first, a double temple divided down its axis so that Sobek the crocodile god and Horus the Elder each get an identical half, with a crocodile museum next door holding the mummified animals found on the site. The boat carries on to Edfu, where a horse-drawn carriage takes you through the town to the Temple of Horus, the most complete temple left standing in Egypt.
The burial ground of the New Kingdom pharaohs. In the Valley of the Kings you go down into tombs cut deep into the rock, among them those of Ramses and Seti, with Tutankhamun's available as a separate ticket. The Temple of Hatshepsut follows, terraced straight into the limestone cliff behind it, and the Colossi of Memnon stand out in the fields on the way back to the boat.
Karnak first, where the columns of the hypostyle hall and the sacred lake give some sense of how long successive pharaohs kept building here. Luxor Temple follows, once joined to Karnak by the Avenue of Sphinxes. You fly back to Cairo in the late afternoon and the last evening is yours.
Breakfast, then a representative collects you and handles the transfer to Cairo International Airport for your flight home.