MFA brings Egypt back to life

Walk in, flash your ID card at the hostess manning the admission booth, and you'll be let in VIP-style. You can even give a little wave to the other patrons, wink at the guard, let them know that, hey, you do this sort of thing all the time.

This is one of the perks of being a Tufts student: free admission to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA). But few seem to take advantage of it.

A few seconds walk and one quick right later, you'll find yourself standing at the base of Nubia, the kingdom that stretched below Upper Egypt for thousands of years and, though not as well-known as the Egyptian civilization itself, derived wonders equal to its northern neighbors.

The Nubian pieces are fascinating, but they are not your goal today. Glancing briefly over the carved figurines and the remarkable preserved pottery, you make your way down the exhibit and through a glass door. Then, you take a quick left to find yourself in the middle of Ancient Egypt itself.

With no one else in the room, it's easy to imagine that you're living a scene straight out of Hollywood fiction. Picture the mummies sitting up, coming alive, giving you accounts of civilizations long since vanquished by the passage of time.

Yet, standing under the dim lights and shadowed walls of the MFA's Egyptian Funerary exhibit, it is impossible to shake the feeling that the real story is already there, in the carved figurines, the delicately adorned funeral shrouds, the obelisks and hieroglyphs and gigantic stone coffins, a morbid retelling of millennia long past.

For a civilization so accomplished, so capable of great things that they could create pyramids stretching to the sky and minute figurines withstanding the wear of centuries, the Egyptians were almost unnaturally entranced with death. They spent their entire lives questing for an afterlife, wanting to preserve the things they loved so dearly about this world to comfort them in the next. Consequently, almost paradoxically, the most effective way to learn about the lives of the ancient Egyptians is to study them in death, to make sense of the elaborate funeral rituals and burial chambers and to translate what we find there into knowledge about their way of life.

Upon entering the funerary exhibit, the most striking feature lies in the center of the room, an elaborate sarcophagus set complete with a well-preserved mummy. Its sides are covered in pictures and pictographs, as finely decorated in death as any of today's creations are in life.

It is almost difficult to comprehend the true importance of the hieroglyphic carvings _ for the ancient Egyptians, art and knowledge were so finely intertwined that one could not be separated from the other, so much so that their written language was one of pictures. Every sketched scarab, every winged eye, every engraved image from the imprints of the gods to the smallest circle design has an elaborate meaning, designed to protect and preserve and guide its owner on his or her way to the afterlife.

The rest of the exhibit is equally compelling, and no less grand than the Funerary section. There are carved images of gods from Horus to Ra, funeral masks and funeral shrouds, another sarcophagus, figurines that once lined the inside of tombs and pyramids. Two more mummies lie carefully preserved on a right-side display case, complete with portraits in the shape of shrouds that show what they might have looked like in life. The smaller of the pair is that of a child, hard though it is to imagine that someone could live and die so young and so long ago and yet last for so long, and withstand the turning of so many years.

Everything about this exhibit amazes and exhilirates the viewer. As you stands in the middle of the museum's Egyptian exhibit, you cannot help but think that perhaps these extraordinary ancient people accomplished their life's goal after all, their accomplishments in death outliving time to teach the people of today so much about their past.