Ancient objects whisper the desire to live forever to receptive modern ears

Against vistas of sun-baked dunes and cold, star-filled desert nights, the ancient Egyptians created an art and culture centered on death and the afterlife.

"To Live Forever: Egyptian Treasures From The Brooklyn Museum," a traveling exhibit of more than 100 objects explores this relationship to the afterlife and the gods and goddesses who inhabited this universe. The exhibit includes a mummy and portrait of Demetrios, a wealthy citizen of Hawara (95-100 A.D.), two mummies of dogs (664 B.C.-395 A.D.), a painted coffin of a mayor of Thebes (about 1075-945 B.C), stone sculptures and statues, protective jewelry, amulets and ritual vessels. Here an ancient civilization that has fascinated generations with its wealth of materials, such as faience and gold, and dark imaginings is vividly brought to life. Since the early 19th century a fascination with things Egyptian called Egyptomania has influenced many aspects of western visual culture, most recently Halloween costumes of "The Mummy" and horror films.

The exhibit illustrates the longevity of Egyptian culture, beginning with a knife from the Pre-Dynastic Period (4400-3000 B.C.) to the dog mummies of the Roman and Byzantine Periods (30 B.C.-642 A.D.). A clear sense of the vast span of elapsed time in Egyptian history can be demonstrated by the fact that we are closer in time to Cleopatra (who died in 31 B.C.) as the last Ptolemaic queen of Egypt, than she is to her antecedents -- the first kings of the Early Dynastic Period (circa 3000-2675 B.C.). Is it any wonder that with such a history and complex cosmology of death, and art about death, that the modern mind is so intrigued?

The diversity of scale of these funerary objects ranges from a quarter-inch-thick gold amulet representing the soul as a human-head falcon from Saqqara, to an 81-inch painted wood anthropoid coffin of the Servant of the Great Place, Teti, from Thebes.

During their lives, ancient Egyptians amassed a wide variety of such objects that were placed in their tombs to assist them in the journey to the afterlife. In a sense they succeeded, because although the afterlife of these objects has not been what their creators intended, there is no doubt that the journey their art objects have traveled expresses a timeless human desire to live forever.