Of all the objects so far removed from the tomb, none has attracted more attention, and none seems likely to create more controversy, than the group of extraordinary gilt state couches, the Lion, Hathor, and Typhon couches, as they came to be called. The thing which drew attention to them was not their beauty, for anything more hideous it is impossible to imagine; it was their strangeness. With Egyptian couches and biers the world was pretty familiar before; but these were widely different, with their quiet and shapely lines, from the barbaric monstrosities of Tutankhamen’s tomb. The heads of the couches present, indeed, some resemblances to familiar Egyptian types; but even so, the suggestion which rises to the mind on viewing them is that these are Egyptian types interpreted by an alien temperament and executed by alien craftsmen. It seems almost impossible to believe that an Egyptian craftsman, with his tradition of taste and restraint, would ever have produced such abortions, calculated to produce nightmares instead of slumber in those who tried to rest upon them. Accordingly Professor Petrie has asserted that these couches are not of Egyptian workmanship at all. No Egyptian workman, he says, ever produced work assembled with bronze joints as these couches are; they must have been produced in a distant country, and jointed in this fashion for convenience of transport, being reassembled on their arrival. Further, the decoration (trefoil) on one of them is characteristically Babylonian. Therefore it seems probable that we must look to Babylon for their origin; and Professor Petrie suggests that these are the identical couches to which the Babylonian king Kadashman-Enlil refers in one of the Tell el-Amarna letters, where he says, writing to Amenhotep III, that he is sending to the Egyptian king “a couch of _ushu_ wood, ivory and gold, three couches and six thrones of _ushu_ and gold,” and other furniture.