Five days on a five-star boat from Luxor to Aswan, stopping at Karnak, the Valley of the Kings, Edfu, Kom Ombo, Philae and the High Dam.
You board in Luxor, settle into your cabin and have lunch before the afternoon tour. Karnak takes up most of it — one of the largest religious complexes ever built, and big enough that an hour inside barely covers the main axis. Luxor Temple, in the centre of town, rounds off the afternoon.
The Valley of the Kings after breakfast, where you go inside royal tombs whose walls are still covered in painted scenes of the afterlife. From there to the Temple of Hatshepsut, set beneath dramatic limestone cliffs at Deir el-Bahari and quite unlike anything else in Egypt, then a stop at the Colossi of Memnon before the boat sails on towards Esna.
A traditional horse carriage carries you up to the Temple of Horus at Edfu, remarkably intact and worth the visit for the sheer scale of what is still standing. Back on board, the boat sails to Kom Ombo, where the temple is built as a mirror image so two gods could share it without either taking precedence.
A guided morning around Aswan's landmarks: the High Dam first, then a boat across to Philae, the island temple of Isis and one of the loveliest settings in the country. The day finishes at the Unfinished Obelisk, still lying in the granite quarry where it cracked — oddly more instructive than a finished monument, because you can see exactly how the work was done.
Breakfast, then disembarkation. An early excursion to Abu Simbel can be added, to see the temples of Ramses II and Queen Nefertari carved into the sandstone cliffs above Lake Nasser.
Optional: Early excursion to Abu Simbel