New galleries showcasing the Ashmolean Museum’s world-famous collections from ancient Egypt will open to the public on Saturday.

The £5m redevelopment promises visitors a chronological journey covering more than 5,000 years of human occupation of the Nile Valley.

The creation of six new galleries for the collections of Ancient Egypt and Nubia (present-day Sudan) allows the museum to display objects kept in storage for decades — with the number of mummies and coffins on display more than doubled.

Collected over 300 years, the Ashmolean’s Egyptian holdings also tell fascinating stories of archaeological discovery in new settings designed by Rick Mather Architects, who were responsible for the Ashmolean’s earlier £61m extension opened by the Queen The galleries, and the rehousing of some 40,000 ancient objects, represent the second phase of a redevelopment that has transformed the museum in Beaumont Street, the oldest museum in Britain and the oldest university museum in the world.

The Ashmolean is now attracting a million visitors a year, compared to 350,000 annually before, and in August, VisitEngland put the Ashmolean in the top 20 free visitor attractions in England, receiving the highest visitor numbers of all the free museums and galleries outside London.

Dr Christopher Brown, director of the Ashmolean, said the new Egyptian galleries should attract even more, by opening up what has always been one of the museum’s biggest draws. With new lighting, display cases and interpretation, the project completes the Ashmolean’s Ancient World floor.

The Ashmolean’s collections have included important Egyptian artefacts since 1683, when the museum was founded. It has long been recognised as one of the finest collections outside Cairo but until now lack of space meant many treasures remained in the basement.

Dr Brown said: “Rick Mather’s design for the galleries allows us to display material that for reasons of conservation has not been seen for up to half a century.”

Three Roman mummies, excavated by Flinders Petrie, the founding father of Egyptology in the UK, at the Roman cemeteries of Hawara, south-west of Cairo, in 1911 are among the Ashmolean’s “new” exhibits. They feature three beautifully restored mummy portraits of well-off young people. The oldest, on linen, is of a young woman dating from 55-70AD.

In advance of the official opening tomorrow night by Minister of Culture and Wantage MP Ed Vaizey, The Oxford Times was invited on a tour of the new galleries, divided under themes: Egypt at its Origins; Dynastic Egypt and Nubia; Life After Death in Ancient Egypt; The Amarna Revolution; Egypt in the Age of Empires; and Egypt Meets Greece and Rome.

The first gallery is created in space previously occupied by the museum shop, with the centre of this gallery dominated by striking limestone statues of the fertility god Min, dating from 3,000 BC. They are among the oldest preserved stone sculptures in the world.

Visiting children anxious to delight in mummies, coffins, kings and curses, may see Life After Death as the real highlight. The centre boasts the remarkable set of nested painted coffins belonging to Djeddjehutyiuefankh, a 7th-century BC Theban priest. But on Monday his mummified body was missing!

My guide Liam McNamara, assistant keeper Ancient Egypt and Sudan, explained that the famous mummy would be returning to his elaborate triple coffin in good time for Friday’s big opening. Dj was indeed in the building, having returned from an extended stay at the Churchill Hospital, Oxford, where he underwent extensive scanning.

The redevelopment has given opportunity for 9,200 hours of restoration work along with modern tests. So while his wooden coffins were being restored, the mummy was examined with high-tech medical equipment. “It is no longer necessary to have to unwrap them because of modern scanning,” said Mr McNamara. “We hope to learn such things as his age and the cause of his death.”

The centrepiece of the exhibition, the Shire of Taharqa, had to remain in place throughout the redevelopment because of its sheer weight. Built around 680 BC as part of the temple complex at Kawa in ancient Sudan, it is the largest free-standing ancient Egyptian building in the UK. This gallery has been opened up to spectacular effect, allowing the footprint of four columns to be incorporated into the floor to convey its original setting in the temple complex. Above it a “sky” ceiling able to illuminate the impressive monument in daylight and at dusk.

And there is a further surprise when you look inside to see a 690BC sculpture of Pharaoh Taharqa, the original restorer of the shrine. This remarkable statue was recently rediscovered in the stores of a Southampton museum and is on loan to allow the great building king to be reunited with one of his great monuments, for the first time in 2,500 years.

Everywhere you look underlines the point that ensuring eternal life was a serious business for ancient Egyptians. Non-royal Egyptian believed in different types of afterlife, including eternal life lived in the tomb as a ka (soul), and an afterlife lived in the Field of Reeds. It is difficult not to be touched by the bewildering display of small objects, all designed as practical tools to help their owners make the journey from death to something better and eternal.

One display explores the role of sacred animals in the cult of deities, something which fascinated Greek and Roman visitors to Egypt, just as it now will local schoolchildren.

A wealth of documents excavated at Thebes in the Valley of the Kings — mainly chips of stone on which villagers drew and wrote — reveal the lives of workmen from the cost of hiring a donkey to the outcome of a court case. The large Sinuhe Ostracon is inscribed with the tale of a famous traveller, one of the most important examples of Ancient Egyptian literature.

Herodotus famously declared that Egypt is the gift of the River Nile. The gift of Oxford’s new Egyptian galleries cannot be put down to a single source, although Lord Sainsbury’s Linbury Trust and the Selz Foundation made it possible with substantial contributions.

For all the mummies and treasures taken from tombs, there will be no talk of curses this weekend at a museum that more than ever will be counted as one of Oxford’s great blessings.