Unless you live in a cave or have been out of the UK for the past few weeks, you will know that treasures from Tutankhamun's tomb are coming to London for the first time since 1972. The earlier show was the UK's first museum blockbuster: some 1.7m people queued to see the treasures and then helped to kickstart a tourism boom which not even wars and terrorism have managed to stop. This time there is more reason to visit Egypt after the O2 Dome: many of Tutankhamun's iconic treasures, including the solid gold funeral mask and coffin, are not coming to London. But there's more to the boy wonder than glitz: the trail we have laid out here also takes you to some of Egypt's most exciting sights.

TELL AL-AMARNA

The Place: For a very short but remarkable period in Egyptian history, Amarna was Egypt's capital. At a time of great political and religious conflict, Pharaoh Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti trumped the priests of Amun in Luxor and created a new religion based on the worship of a single deity, the sun god Aten. They also created a new city for Aten at Tell al-Amarna, about halfway between Luxor and Cairo. The place was gradually abandoned after their reign and the scant ruins of temples and palaces now emerge out of the desert, wedged between rich farmland and barren cliffs, on this beautiful bend in the Nile.

The Connection: Little is known about Tutankhamun's early years, but it seems he was born in Tell al-Amarna around 1340BC and that he was Akhenaten's son or his son-in-law, so the trail runs through the royal quarters and temples. Originally called Tutankhaten, he came to the throne around the age of eight or nine. Within two years, he had changed his name to Tutankhamun, restored Amun as the state god and reopened the temples in Luxor, holding his coronation in the grandeur of Luxor's Karnak temple.

LUXOR

The Place: Luxor was Egypt's religious capital for many centuries and its temples and tombs are among the world's greatest wonders. After Tutankhamun restored the cult of Amun, Luxor remained the country's pre-eminent religious centre for almost a thousand years. Although little of the everyday ancient city has survived, the great state temples still stand on the east bank - absorbed into modern Luxor - while the Nile's West Bank is dotted with tombs and funerary temples of the great pharaohs. Luxor has long been a place of fascination, but since the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb, and the "curse of the pharaoh" deaths that followed it, it has become the epicentre of Egyptian tourism.

The Connection: Tutankhamun's political and military base was in Memphis, near Cairo, but his hand is evident in the religiously significant city of Luxor. His tomb in the Valley of the Kings is his most famous memorial and, although one of the least interesting tombs in the valley and in spite a photography ban and an extra £8 charge, it still draws crowds. The tomb was so important because it had remained more or less intact since the burial. On 26 November 1922, archaeologist Howard Carter and his backer Lord Carnarvon knocked a hole through a doorway. Carter shone his torch inside, saw what he called "wonderful things' and sparked the international phenomenon of Tut-mania. In case Tutankhamun isn't already overexposed, his mummy, usually safe in its coffin, goes on public show in the tomb this month for the first time.

Tutankhamun's West Bank funerary temple has disappeared, but his statue survives in the East Bank Karnak Temple, and there is a beautiful carving of the pharaoh making offerings on the northwest wall of Luxor Temple's colonnade. Luxor Museum has a number of pieces from the tomb and elsewhere in the city, including the pharaoh's sandals, arrows, a statue of the cow-headed goddess and another of the young pharaoh. Carter's house - where the archaeologist lived when he made the discovery - is closed to visitors, but the Winter Palace Hotel, his East Bank base, is very much open for business.

CAIRO

The Place: The city didn't exist during the boy king's reign. Memphis, the old capital, 15 miles south of Cairo, was already some 1700 years old by the time Tutankhamun was crowned. Little of ancient Memphis remains above ground, but the nearby Pyramids and Sphinx would have been as familiar to the young ruler as they are to us.

The Connection: There are plans for the most famous of Tutankhamun's "fabulous things", the gold coffins among them, to be moved to a new Grand Egyptian Museum (www.gem.gov.eg ) at the Pyramids. But with work yet to start, the current Egyptian Museum's upper floor (www.egyptianmuseum.gov.eg ) remains home to the treasures brought from Luxor. There's so much gold and beauty on show, you are unlikely to notice that some things have been shipped off to London. And there are so many human touches among the state grandeur - the carved headrests that look far from comfortable, the simple sandals, the exquisite jewellery and so much more - that here, at the end of the trail, you may finally have a sense of the young man behind the mask.

Travel details:

Egypt Travel

• Discover the Nile on a voyage into the past
• The pharaohs get a face-lift
• Bringing Egypt's history to life for the kids