The Throne of Tutankhamen is of wood, covered with a thin plating of gold and adorned with finely carved lions’ heads. The arms of the chair are of modelled wood also overlaid with gold, and beneath them, on either side, is a sacred uræus, partly wrought in glaze, with the crown of Egypt in silver. On the back of the throne is a panel of beautiful workmanship, on which the king is represented seated, with his legs crossed, and giving his hand to the Queen, who is standing--a motive which in its unconventionality speaks distinctly of the realistic art of Tell el-Amarna, and suggests comparisons with the famous Berlin relief in which Akhenaten leans on his staff, while his Queen Nefertiti holds out a lotus bloom for him to sniff. The exposed flesh of the faces and other parts of the body is beautifully modelled in semi-opaque reddish glaze, while the King’s costume is rendered in painting overlaid with crystal. The queen’s dress is wrought in silver, and beside her, on a table, there stands a charming bouquet formed of semi-precious stones inlaid. The seat of the throne is patterned with blue, white, and gold mosaic squares, set in diagonal lines. The whole effect is gorgeous in the extreme, and the description of the workmanship takes one’s mind back at once to the King’s Gaming Board of the Palace of Knossos, with its blaze of blue and gold and crystal on ivory. Whether we are to infer Cretan influence in the Egyptian splendour, or whether Crete derived from earlier Egyptian work, is a question which may prove of interest in the future. At any rate, we know that the two great cultures were for many centuries in the closest touch, and that each borrowed from the other, adapting the foreign ideas to its own tastes. One of the features of the throne is highly suggestive of the conditions of Tutankhamen’s reign. On the gold plating of the chair, the royal cartouche has been altered, and shows the name which the king adopted after his conversion to orthodoxy. At the side of the arms, however, the cartouche, wrought in inlay of semi-precious stones and glass, remains unaltered, and still shows the old heretical form Tutankhaten. The manifest reason for the difference is that while it was comparatively easy to alter a cartouche wrought in gold plate, it was very much the opposite with one wrought in inlay. Tutankhamen, spite of his royal dignity, had, like Mrs. Gilpin, a frugal mind, and could see no sense in discarding his old Tell el-Amarna throne, even though it could not be perfectly adapted to his change of circumstances and of faith.