There are not many things which took all attention of the ancient Egyptians more than the preparation for leaving their lives.

Some started to prepare earlier, some later, but everyone from lowest to highest class society were engaging themselves after burying their own parents into collecting and gathering all things necessary along the journey to an everlasting life in the kingdom of Osiris.

For the royal elite or just wealthy egyptians that might mean sarcophagues with lots of costly jewelry on them and gilded wooden coffin. But even an upper-middle-class scribes could spend a year’s salary on such essential funerary objects, in hope to protect their own mummified bodies and souls along the travel to another world.

Lots of precious stones, name tags were covering the last journey boat of these people. Yet it was not enough to fulfill it satisfactory. Men used to put some weapons around them for protection and women surrounded themselves with mirrors, perfumes and cosmetics. And everyone who could be stocked up on symbolic effigies of food and servants in addition to mummified pets were required as well to brighten up those far away journey’s dull moments.

Not for nothing did the Egyptians refer to the burial tomb as the House of Death — and many did everything they could to see that their own personal afterlife was well-furnished.

“It was one of the great expenses of a lifetime,” says Brooklyn Museum curator Edward Bleiberg, describing the hoard of more than 120 objects that will go on view at the Chrysler Museum of Art Wednesday in “To Live Forever: Egyptian Treasures from the Brooklyn Museum.”

“And sometimes you’d spend a lifetime preparing for it.”

Physician acquired art originally assembled in the 1820s and ’30s, the Brooklyn Museum’s world-renowned collection dates back to some of the earliest days of the modern interest in Egyptian art and antiquities.

English physician and antiquarian Henry Abbott acquired most of the objects during a two-decade-long residence in Cairo, where he not only worked alongside the prominent Egyptologists of the period, but also had many chances to buy from tombs that were revealed in his presence.

“He had such a wonderful eye for Egyptian art. He really knew how to pick out the best,” Bleiberg says. “The British Museum and the Louvre were collecting at the same time — and it was certainly a time when you could take your pick.”

More than a dozen objects come from the Brooklyn Museum’s famed permanent galleries. A lot of others have been newly conserved or, in some cases, conserved for the first time after being drawn from storage.

Once in Brooklyn, that’s it Among the unexpected treasures this treatment revealed is the “Coffin of the Lady of the House, Weretwahset, Reinscribed for Bensuipet,” which dates to about 1,200 B.C. — and which is now slated to go on permanent display at the museum once the traveling show returns.

“These are rare and priceless objects from one of the greatest collections of Egyptian art in the world — and they’ll probably never come this way again,” Chrysler chief curator Jefferson C. Harrison says. “They may never leave Brooklyn again once they return.”

Equally distinctive is the broad reach of the exhibition’s objects, which demonstrates not only the wealth of the upper crust but also the equally strong funerary impulses that ruled the lives of the low and the middle classes.

In two especially edifying cases, the show compares the gilded mummy masks of a well-to-do man and woman with the simpler, less expensive but not less poignant painted terra cotta examples commissioned by much poorer Egyptians.

“What you see here that you don’t see in other exhibitions is the juxtaposition of the high and mighty with the middle classes and the people who could just barely afford to do more than bury themselves in the sand,” Harrison says.

“This idea of preparing for the afterlife had an extraordinary influence in the daily lives of all Egyptians. It was critically important to people from all levels of society and every walk of life.”

It is very clear how much they cared of that preparation can be seen in the vast industry that grew up and elaborated later on.

But as both Bleiborg and Harrison point out, all these complicated funeral cerimonies that evolved over the centuries rose up quite adequate and yet unanswerable question – what actually happens to us after death?

“Sometimes these things seem so exotic that it’s hard to think of the Egyptians as ordinary people responding to a basic human instinct,” Bleiberg says. “But every object you see was intended to ensure that they would complete their journey into the next world and then live forever. It was about survival.”

It was about faith and belief too, Harrison says. That’s one reason why – when visitors enter the show – they’ll find the lights turned down and the objects presented in ways that are simple, respectful and devout.

“We want to bring the spiritual nature of the objects into play,” he says. “To the Egyptians, these were holy objects. They were steeped in mystery. And they put all their faith in them.

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