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We know the Egyptians through their tombs. Their pyramids are legendary wonders. Their mummified bodies are popular icons. The ghoulish image is so persistent that Egyptologists have taken to reminding us in recent years that this ancient civilization was actually a lively society, not a death cult. With Tombs of Eternity: The Afterlife in Ancient Egypt, at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Que., the pendulum is allowed to swing gently back in its original direction. The show, circulated by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts while that institution undergoes a renovation, successfully explains the Egyptian notion of the afterlife, while dramatically recreating the structure of a tomb.

First, however, we start confusingly with some introductory throat clearing that detracts from the logic and drama of the show's geography: a video about the religious importance of the Nile – why begin an exhibition of priceless ancient artifacts with a video? – and some information about Egyptian political history. But then we are introduced to the figure of George A. Reisner, the Harvard University archeologist who led the American team at the international excavations at Giza, site of the great pyramids. From 1905 to his death in 1942, Reisner dedicated his life to the Egyptian dig, where he helped introduce scientific methods of documentation to a profession that had once been little better than a form of grave robbing.

For example, he photographed all finds in situ; those photos are regularly included here. If scholars were later able to reassemble a net dress of faience beads that one lady wore in her grave, it was thanks to the photo that revealed its pattern, even if the string that once held it together has long since rotted. That dress, and many of the other 4,000-year-old artifacts Reisner unearthed from noble graves of the Old Kingdom period, form the basis of the Boston museum's collection, which is then amplified with gifts and acquisitions from later periods.

These graves were mastaba, or bench graves, with a long shaft that connected an above-ground chapel to an underground burial chamber. We begin by standing in that chapel – an actual stone lintel and door jambs covered in hieroglyphs are on display – where the living would place offerings for the dead. The Egyptians believed the soul of the deceased could travel freely to the surface to use the offerings; the living would never descend the shaft.

That is, however, where we head next. The core of this show is a series of three rooms off the shaft – a dark corridor in this case, rather than a vertical drop – in which aspects of Egyptian life and culture are examined through the goods that would have accompanied a body into the burial chamber. There, they would have provided for an afterlife that seems to have been similar in its requirements to the life that preceded it. Some of these goods are vessels for food and drink, or jewels that would have decorated the body; others are miniature versions of the necessities of life.

For example, a statuette of a woman on her knees grinding grain into flour on a stone slab reveals how the Egyptians prepared bread. Meanwhile, a cartoon strip aimed at contemporary children – and part of the show's smart and subtle integration of activities for kids – reveals the fascinating fact that mummies' bodies show wear on the teeth probably caused by the sand that got in the bread because of this method of milling.

It is details like these, or an encounter with the colossal head of Ramses II in a section on the importance of stone carving to ensuring Egyptian immortality, or merely the sight of a pretty little blue-green faience bead necklace, that makes a long-dead people come alive. In many ways, the Egyptians have achieved the immortality that their complex graves, their mighty monuments and their inscribed stele were built to ensure.

The theme of the final room is the burial chamber. Here, various Canadian institutions have lent the museum their mummies to create a compelling exhibit devoted to the process and philosophy of mummification. The process, whereby internal organs and the brain were removed and stored in jars while the body cavity was dried using linen and salt before the whole body was wrapped, remains the most effective way of preserving a corpse ever devised (with the possible exception of cryogenics, if you had a power source you trusted to keep the freezer running for millennia).

Mummification was very successful – as long as neither water nor jackals got into the grave – but it was also time-consuming and expensive. Going through this exhibition drawn from noble graves, you gradually become aware that a secure afterlife – in which body and soul would be reunited to form the eternal akh – was available only to wealthy Egyptians, rather like a secure retirement today. It makes the next philosophical step – the Christian doctrine that God would take care of the physical resurrection – seem both more logical and rather democratic.

This show's final section includes the mummy of a wealthy woman, of about 65 years and named Hetep-Bastet, now in the collection of the University of Quebec at Montreal and recently scanned to reveal the broken femur that probably led to a fatal infection. Having introduced us to the body of an Egyptian individual it can name, the show ends by provocatively asking what Hetep-Bastet and her people would have thought of this display: The paradox of Egyptology is that, by disturbing these graves, scholars have given Egyptians the immortality they sought.

Tombs of Eternity continues at the Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Que., until Aug. 16.