priesthood became the most powerful organization in the kingdom.
The high priest of Amon usurped the power of the king and finally
supplanted him. Such was the period in which the next great
development of the Egyptian idea of immortality is to be noted--
a period of priestly activity in the beginning and of priestly
domination in the end.

The priests are the scribes, the men of learning. They have the
lore of all magic, medicine, rules of conduct, religious rites.
It is not mere chance, therefore, that the New Empire was marked
by a great increase of magic in all its forms--texts and
symbolic objects--and by a great development in the knowledge
of the other world. In some of the texts the geography of the
underworld, in which Osiris is king, is worked out in great
detail. When the sun sets in the west, Ra in his boat enters the
underworld and passes through it during the twelve hours of the
night, bringing light and happiness to those who are in the
underworld. In the effort to secure the tomb against plundering,
the royal graves had been cut in the solid rock,--long and
complicated passages with false leads and deceptive turns and the
burial chamber in an unexpected place. The long walls of these
rooms presented a great surface suitable to decoration, and they
were utilized to depict scenes from the underworld and the
passage of Ra through it, so that the tombs became in fact
representations of the land of the dead, and were so considered.
These royal tombs were at a distance from the cultivated land,
hidden in valleys in the desert. Their funerary temples were
built on the edge of the desert beside the temples of the gods of
the place.