Rather than an obsession with death, the elaborate burial preparations of the ancient Egyptians were meant to prepare for a new life in the underworld. A major exhibition from the Louvre offers new insight, writes PATRICK McDONALD.

CENTURIES after they were unearthed from the desert sands, the Egyptian antiquities collected by France's Louvre museum are still yielding their mysteries.

Take the sarcophagus of a woman named poplonk[http://egyptianantiquities.com.au/Journey/Sections/Detail.cfm?IRN=161074|Tanethep]. Carved from half a tonne of black diorite stone, it was elaborately engraved inside and out to ensure its occupant a safe journey into the afterlife.

It is among more than 200 objects in Egyptian Antiquities from the Louvre: Journey to the Afterlife, the first exhibition to visit Australia from the famous Paris museum in nearly two decades.

From the later Ptolemaic period, in the 2nd century BC, when classical Greek influences were becoming evident, Tanethep's sarcophagus stands in stark contrast to its more familiar, earlier, gold-and-blue painted counterparts.

"You cannot deny the extraordinary workmanship of something like this, the skill that's gone into it, the wholeness of the vision," says Bronwyn Campbell, co-ordinating curator for the National Gallery of Australia.

"It's so beautiful: even though it is cold, black stone, it's got so much warmth in it."

The external carvings are a three-dimensional representation of passages from Egypt's famous Book of the Dead. The interior is equally spectacular, with the sky goddess Nut watching over the deceased.

It was only while the sarcophagus was being readied for transportation to Australia, however, that a final inscription was detected, added at the base.

Literally, a footnote.

It seems Tanethep was not the final occupant of the sarcophagus, after all. "When they were packing up to send it here, they had to measure it very carefully for its crate," Campbell says. "It was the first time that it had been really closely studied, because the Louvre has 60,000 things in its Egyptian collection.

"The curator happened to notice an inscription on the foot.

"Luckily, he reads hieroglyphics. What it says is that the coffin was re-dedicated - it was a black market coffin. Grave robbers would have come, thrown away her body and sold it again.

"Because the workmanship on this one is so fine, they couldn't just scrape her name off in all the places it was mentioned . . . so they rededicated it, so that all the advantages Tanethep once had were now given to somebody new," says Campbell.

"The somebody new is actually depicted: they put in an extra illustration on the bottom."

While it may seem that the ancient Egyptians were preoccupied with death - from mummification to the elaborate pyramid tombs of the pharaohs - the opposite is in fact true.

Almost everything they built and did was to ensure that they would go on living after death - and not just in a spiritual sense. The Egyptian afterlife was a full-blown physical world where you not only needed a body, but servants, wealth and creature comforts.

"What was buried was preserved, whereas the ephemera of daily life wasn't, so we do get a skewed perspective of everything looking like it's about death," Campbell says.

"But it's all about that journey through the underworld, being born again and living forever."

Journey to the Afterlife allows audiences to trace that path through the underworld as imagined by people thousands of years ago. Like Tanethep, Tchaenhouy thought he knew exactly where he was headed after death.

He would follow the path of the setting sun, across the Nile to the necropolises of the western desert. There he would be welcomed by the goddess Hathor as she received the sun at the end of the day and guarded it through the night.

The 3000-year-old wooden Ushabti chest of Tchaenhouy depicts the deceased in the Hall of Judgment before the falcon-headed god Re-Horakhty, who symbolises the trajectory of the sun and its daily renewal.

Re-Horakhty weighs Tchaenhouy's heart against a small statue of the goddess Maat - who personifies truth and universal order - to validate his earthly actions and grant him leave to enter paradise. The paradise ancient Egyptians aspired to enter was the Field of Reeds, part of the realm of the god Osiris.

The Field of Reeds was rich, green and fertile, with streams of water which irrigated grain crops and were alive with fish. For an agricultural society, heaven meant a world rich in fruits and harvests. The afterlife wasn't meant to be easy, however.

The illustrated papyrus, Vignette from the Book of the Dead of the lady Taperousir, dating from 500-300 BC, shows the late lady in question hard at work tilling fields, sowing grain and reaping the harvest.

Egyptian afterlife was believed to be similar to earthly existence, with work to be done in order to reap prosperity. Not everybody was happy with the notion of working in the afterlife.

"It was an unpleasant kind of thing to do if you were a pharaoh and had never worked in the fields in your life," Campbell says.

The Ushabti Chest of Tchaenhouy therefore contained model funerary "servants" inscribed with a spell to animate them in the afterlife, where they would work on behalf of the pharaoh.

At the height of their popularity, a set of Ushabti figures could number up to 401 - a servant for each day of the year, plus a team of foremen.

Another, more modest artefact also finally gave up its secret on the journey to Australia.

"There's a little box that looks a little bit like a coffin. The information that we were given said it had a mummified body part in it," Campbell says.

"It has this little finger-shaped thing wrapped in a bandage.

"When they were checking it properly to send out here, they discovered it's not actually a body part at all. It's a wax model of a worm - a particular type that vaguely bore a resemblance to the symbol of the backbone of Osiris.

"Those worms became in demand to such a point where they actually started making fake mummified worms to put in these little boxes as souvenirs for pilgrims," Campbell says.

"That's something you won't find in the catalogue."

Egyptian Antiquities from the Louvre: Journey to the Afterlife is at the Art Gallery of South Australia from March 21 to July 1,2007.

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