Ancient Egypt was a society preoccupied by death, but as a child growing up in Richmond during the 1950s, Betsy Bryan didn't think of it like that. For her it was pure wonder.

"The way they had it set up [at the Richmond Museum], it was dark, and the objects really stood out. It was like a secret that I didn't know about," Bryan recalled. "And what I really wanted to know about was how to read the hieroglyphs."

Today, Bryan is a Johns Hopkins professor of Near Eastern studies and, as one of two curators for the National Gallery of Art's current show The Quest for Immortality: Treasures of Ancient Egypt, she is one of the world's acknowledged experts on ancient Egyptian writing as well as art.

The show, which opened last month, brings together some 115 ceremonial and religious objects from Egyptian museums and archaeological sites, plus a life-sized reconstruction of the burial chamber of the ancient ruler Thutmose III (1479-1425 B.C.). It is the largest selection of antiquities ever loaned by Egypt for exhibition in North America.

Bryan is a specialist in the New Kingdom and one of a handful of scholars worldwide who are experts both in the arts and the written languages of ancient Egypt. So when the Danish organizers of the show were looking around for an American curator to partner with Erik Hornung, a renowned professor emeritus of Egyptology at the University of Basel in Switzerland, Bryan was the natural choice. Most recently she has been part of a team excavating the ancient Temple of Mut, begun during the reign of Ramses II (1279-1212 B.C.) at South Karnak in Luxor on the East Bank of the Nile River.

"We're trying to reconstruct the original form of the temple through the materials we find on the site," Bryan explained. "We want to get a ground plan, find out where the processional paths inside and other architectural features were. So that makes me a logical person to do this exhibit, because this is my time period, the mid- to late-18th Dynasty."

Bryan and her colleagues knew they wanted to present images of actual people who lived during the New Kingdom, as well as introduce the public to the major religious ideas of the period, especially those connected with ancient Egyptian funeral rites. But how to select the best works to make the past come alive?

The team decided to find the best objects it could get that illustrated the concepts the show would present - even if that meant not all the objects were made during the New Kingdom.

"If we couldn't get an object, our priority was a good quality object from a different time," Bryan said. "For example, almost nothing remains of the tomb of Thutmose III. We do include one object from his tomb and one from his son's tomb, but there's nothing from his coffin. Yet since this material is very stylized and the motifs were repeated in other time periods, we were able to use objects - like the gold jewelry and amulets - from another site that dates to the period immediately after around 1050 B.C."

What holds the show together is the fact that all the objects illustrate the religious beliefs of Egypt's New Kingdom, which lasted from approximately 1500-1069 B.C. and was one of the most dynamic periods in that civilization's 5,000-year history.

And what objects they are - a gold coffin lid from the tomb of Queen Anhotep, who ruled over Egypt while her sons waged a successful war against foreign enemies; an exquisite ebony and gilded wood chair, painted with the god that protects children and mothers, that once belonged to Princess Sitamun, daughter of Amenhotep III (1390-1350); and a startlingly lifelike statue of a royal scribe named Amenhotep Son of Hapu, the architect to King Amenhotep II, who was deified himself after his death because of his close relationship to the king.

'Dig in the sand'

Bryan still remembers the first time she saw works of Egyptian art at the Richmond Museum when she was 10. She was fascinated.

"I just got really interested. I started reading books about it, everything I could find. An aunt who was very supportive gave me books to read."

Call it love at first sight.

By the time Bryan was 12, she had already made up her mind that she would become an Egyptologist. It was the only thing she can remember ever wanting to do. All through high school she read everything she could on the subject.

"I remember writing my college application and saying I wanted to go to Egypt and dig in the sand," she says. "The college didn't even have a program in Egyptology."

The youngest of two daughters of a history buff father and a musically gifted mother, Bryan ended up majoring in medieval history and geology at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Va. (the state's flagship school, the University of Virginia, didn't accept women at that time).

While at Mary Washington, she met her husband, Charles, who was a student at Virginia. After graduation, the couple headed for New Haven, Conn., where Charles had been accepted into Yale's law school.

"I had wanted to go to University of Chicago, which was the only place I knew about that had a program in Egyptology," she recalls. "It was only when we got to New Haven that I realized Yale had a program, too. So I applied and was accepted."

(There are only eight Ph.D. programs in Egyptology in the United States: Yale, Brown, New York University Institute of Fine Arts, University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins University, UCLA, University of California at Berkley and Chicago.)

Bryan enrolled in Yale's program in 1972. By the time her husband finished law school, she had completed her graduate course work and was ready to start writing her doctoral dissertation. In 1974, the couple moved to New York, a good move for Bryan, because it allowed her to write her dissertation at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, which has a world-renowned library of Egyptology. Her research took her to France, Holland and England, then on to Egypt for a six-week stay at the Cairo Museum and at the large temple complex of Karnak in Luxor.

For the next six years, she researched and wrote her thesis (a study of New Kingdom monarch Thutmose IV) with a brief interruption for the birth of the first of her three children in 1978). But in 1980, as a newly minted Ph.D., she ran up against the bane of Egyptologists the world over:

"There were no jobs," she recalls. "It's a tough field."

So she worked as an editor for an Egyptological book series published by the Brooklyn Museum for the next three years and also taught part-time at Yale, "basically just waiting until something came up," she says. "That's when I got lucky - because just about then this chair at Hopkins was created."

The Hopkins post, whose occupant is officially known as the Alexander Badawy professor of Egyptian art and archaeology, had an interesting history.

"It was actually endowed by an Egyptian scholar named Alexander Badawy, who had taught art history at UCLA for most of his career," Bryan recalled. "But for some reason, he disliked his own school and decided to give his money to Hopkins instead."

Bryan and her husband moved to Baltimore in 1986 (Charles transferred to the Washington office of his New York firm).

"I was hired to do Egyptian art, but in fact I teach as much language as I do art and history," she says. "When I first came, I was teaching the Coptic language and an undergraduate course. Egyptologists have to do both language and art, because when people write with both art and pictures, it's kind of hard to divorce the language from the writing."

Since coming to Hopkins, Bryan has been a curator and consultant to many museum shows, including the reinstallation of the Egyptian collection at the Walters Art Museum.

Conflict of views

As an Egyptologist, Bryan often finds herself at odds with scholars of classical Greece and Rome, whose views of ancient Egypt she finds strangely distorted by those later societies' prejudices toward the earlier civilization.

Edith Hamilton, for example, who for many years was headmistress of Baltimore's Bryn Mawr School and who wrote a classic study of ancient Greek civilization, largely dismissed Egypt as an autocratic, repressive culture obsessed with death.

"In Egypt the center of interest was the dead," Hamilton wrote in The Greek Way, first published in 1930. "To the Egyptians the enduring world of reality was not the one he walked in along the paths of everyday life but the one he should presently go to by the way of death."

For Bryan, such judgments have been overtaken by more recent research, which paints quite a different picture.

"Stuff like that is very romantic, and it makes a nice distinction between the Egyptians and other people, but it's not the least bit true," she says. "It's true they believed their sun god had to fight chaos all the time, but they had put in operation what they thought was a reliable system to guarantee that the god could do that. I think the average Egyptian went about his business even not thinking about such things. They worried about the same things we do, basically - feeding their families, raising their children, etc."

Or take this passage from Hamilton: "The state of the common man in the ancient world must have been wretched in the extreme. Those tremendous works that have survived through thousands of years were achieved at a cost in human suffering and death which was never conceived of as a cost in anything of value. Nothing was so cheap as human life in Egypt."

Again, Bryan respectfully demurs. "I wouldn't want to be the one to say there wasn't human suffering in ancient Egypt. The pyramids were built by hundreds of thousands of people doing labor for the state; I'm sure it was repressive, but in truth ancient Egypt was probably not a whole lot more repressive than ancient Greece."

Bryan says the "biggest myth" about ancient Egypt is that "the pharaoh had the power to do whatever he wished to anyone. The reality is, when we look behind the scenes, it's pretty clear Egypt was a ritualized society, more like the Chinese empire in that the king was dressed by other people, he had a day that was largely ceremonial and the extent to which his power was used was very carefully prescribed. It's only when he leads his troops in battle that you see him break the mold. There's not a whole lot of evidence he could punish on a whim. He needed his nobles and priests to stay in power; in fact, he needed them as much as they needed him."

Bryan says she became an Egyptologist "because I was fascinated by the mystery. But what made me stay one was that these were people just like you and me. And I find that so much more interesting.

"I read a letter recently written by a man to his wife 3,500 years ago. In it, he asks her, 'What have I done that you're acting this way?' He says, 'I married you, honored you, blah, blah. And then when I had to be away serving Pharaoh, you died. I haven't been able to eat or drink since.'

"You read this letter, and you wonder, why does he think she's mad at him? And then at the very end he tells us. He says that 'over there in the next world, I'll go to court, and we'll work it out. I'm going to contend with you in the next world - but for all your sisters who are still in my house, I have not had sex with any of them!'

"So he says exactly what he's feeling guilty about, and why she's mad at him. And that's who the Egyptians were; they were just people, just like us."

Glenn McNatt's art column will return in two weeks.

Exhibit

What: The Quest for Immortality: Treasures of Ancient Egypt

Where: National Gallery of Art, Fourth Street at Constitution Avenue N.W., Washington

When: Through Oct. 14

Hours: Monday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sunday 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Admission: Free

Call: 202-737-4215 or visit the museum Web site, www.nga.gov