Luxor: canonical, contested, and the false forms on record
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name Luxor, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use Luxor to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The tradition's record preserves this name in its romanized scholarly form: Luxor — no older script survives to transcribe, so the canonical content is the exactness of the spelling itself.
Say it aloud as the sources heard it: “LUK-sor” The marks are what carry that sound to a reader who has never heard it spoken.
On the plain form — and I want to be precise, because you pushed on this. The plain form luxor differs from the canonical Luxor only by convention of display — case, not content. It is acceptable everywhere: in legacy systems, in plain-text citation, in the DNS itself. What is not acceptable is what follows in the register: respellings that change the letters, not just their case.
One more thing, because it always surprises: the name did not stay home. Luxor temple served Amun in his ithyphallic generative form — Amun-Min-Kamutef, ‘bull of his mother’ — tying the sanctuary to Min’s fertility theology. Its chapels later honoured the Roman imperial cult, then the mosque of Abu Haggag: three religions in one floor-plan, each claiming the same consecrated ground.
And it never stopped working. The colonnade of Amenhotep III, floodlit on the Nile’s corniche, is the most photographed temple front in the world after the Pyramids. The birth-colonnade’s iconography — Khnum at the potter’s wheel, the divine child — became the standard visual argument of Egyptian kingship, copied in every royal birth-chapel of the New Kingdom.
The Convention's Own History
Egyptological transliteration exists because hieroglyphs write consonants, not vowels. The characters ꜣ (aleph) and ꜥ (ayin) are consonants — a glottal reed and a pharyngeal grip — and rendering them as vowels does not "simplify" the name, it deletes consonants from it. The conventions in use descend from nineteenth-century decipherment and the standardized Manuel de Codage: ḥ, ḫ, ḏ, ṯ each mark a distinct consonant the Egyptian wrote and a modern reader must not merge. When this register defends them, it defends the principle that a writing system older than the alphabet gets to keep its consonants.
Where Protocol Meets Practice
The technical answer is simple: the canonical marks are legal IDNA 2008 characters, encoded as punycode under `xn--`. The practical answer is messier: legal does not mean stocked (registrar inventory is partial), and stocked does not mean typeable (stacked diacritics defeat mobile keyboards).
So the register's rule is a hierarchy of attested forms — full restoration, circumflex, macron-only, attested variant, and finally plain ASCII for the systems that cannot carry marks. Every rung is defensible because every rung is attested. The forms this register rules against are not rungs; they are errors, and errors do not get rungs.
Write back when you have checked the sources; they are better company than I am.
— The Register
The Verdict
Luxor is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form luxor shares that standing — the two are the same name in every system. The false forms above are documented so that no reader has to take the temple's word on faith — the violations are stated, the sources are named, and the register stands open to challenge on every line.
The temple of Luxor stands at /luxor/.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 4 cited sources — Luxor temple birth-colonnade reliefs (Amenhotep III), Opet festival reliefs and barque-docking scenes, Abu Haggag mouloud tradition.
The Register Continues
The register holds 597 entries like this one — each temple with its own ruling. Read the temple's founding dispatch for the story, its Restoration File for the philology, its Resonance File for the industries, or the whole archive end to end.
Continue the register — previous entry: Lono (read it) · next entry: Mꜣ (read it).
The Canonical Register is written from the same canonical record as the lexicon itself. If a false form is missing from this page, it is because the evidence does not support calling it false — or because we have not seen it yet. Show us, with a citation, and the register will answer.