The size, splendour and wealth of Thebes were already legendary at the time of Homer:
"... O how much (wealth flows) into Egyptian Thebes, where the treasuries contain infinite riches, Thebes of the hundred doors, from each one of which two hundred soldiers come out armed with chariots and horses..."
(Homer, The Iliad IX, 381-84)
Strabo reached Thebes in 30 A.D., and after quoting Homer wrote:
"Traces of its grandeur are still evident today, with the ruins stretching out eighty stadia in length. There are several temples, but these were mutilated by Cambyses. Today all that remains is a series of villages." (Strabo 17;1;46)
Thebes was an important religious and political centre of Egypt from the 17th to the 20th Dynasties, except for the Amarna period.
