Egyptians did not expect to survive death automatically. Continued existence was an achievement, dependent on the body remaining intact, on the name being spoken, on offerings continuing, and on the dead person knowing what to do.
A person was understood as several components rather than a body plus a soul. The ka was a vital double that needed sustenance and received the offerings. The ba, drawn as a bird with a human head, could leave the tomb and return to it. The akh was the effective, transfigured state the dead hoped to reach. Mummification preserved the physical anchor for these, and the elaborate technique visible in surviving bodies is a technical response to a specific requirement rather than a general reverence for corpses.
The best-known scene in the funerary papyri shows the heart weighed against the feather of maat, with Anubis at the balance, Thoth recording, and a composite creature waiting to consume anyone who fails. It is tempting to read this as moral judgement in the later sense, but the same manuscripts supply spells to stop the heart from testifying against its owner, which suggests a test to be passed by preparation as much as by conduct.
Cost governed all of it. Full mummification, a decorated tomb, a stocked burial and an endowment to keep the offerings coming were available to a small minority. The great majority of Egyptians were buried simply, in the sand, and what they expected is largely unrecorded. Any account of Egyptian ideas about death is in practice an account of what a wealthy minority could afford to have written down.