Osiris Resurrecting, 664–525 BCE. Gneiss, with a headdress in electrum and gold, 11 5/8 x 7 1/16 x 21 7/8 inches. From Horbeit; The Egyptian Museum, Cairo   From earliest times the ancient Egyptians denied the physical impermanence of life. They formulated a remarkably complex set of religious beliefs and funneled vast material resources into the quest for immortality. While Egyptian civilization underwent many cultural changes over the course of its nearly three-thousand-year history, the pursuit of life after death endured. The Quest for Immortality: Treasures of Ancient Egypt focuses on the understanding of the afterlife in the period of the New Kingdom (1550–1069 BCE). The New Kingdom marked the beginning of an era of great wealth, power, and stability for Egypt and was accompanied by a burst of cultural activity. Much of the activity was devoted to the quest for eternal life and was focused in the capital Thebes (modern-day Luxor), located along the banks of the Nile in Upper Egypt. The works of art on display here—statues, jewelry, painted coffins, and other furnishings for the tomb—have been chosen to detail beliefs in the time of Thutmose III (1479–1425 BCE), when solar religion dominated even the realm of the dead. Thutmose III was a great military leader, and his war-won affluence supported the great sun gods Re and Amun-Re, so that their temples and religious influence grew enormously. This impact continued to be felt in funerary religion through the New Kingdom and after. Statues, such as those in the exhibition, were thought to contain the divine essence of a god or person before and after death, since life was conceived of as cyclical and everlasting—like the rising and setting of the sun. The Egyptians anticipated their own eternal existence by building memorials to themselves and their gods, trusting that their rulers would maintain the world. Kings guaranteed that the floods of the Nile would bring good harvests, that Egypt would be secure from its enemies, and that the gods would be satisfied with their temples and offerings. In return for providing stability in the world, the kings expected to enter the council of great gods when they died, and their great tombs portrayed them newly born as sun gods. Likewise, all people shared the belief that their allegiance to their kings and gods would also bring them ultimate divinity. That belief, and the rich works of art that express it, reflect the supreme importance of the quest for immortality in ancient Egypt.