There is nothing unlikely in the idea that couches of such international importance, coming from one great monarch to another, should have been preserved for the matter of forty years or so, and buried as heirlooms in the tomb of the last of the line; and the suggestion lends an added interest to the ugly things. Sir E. A. W. Budge, however, rejects the idea, and asserts that the beast represented on the most hideous of the couches is simply the composite monster Ammit, “the Eater of the Dead,” so often represented in the Judgment Scene in the vignettes of the _Book of the Dead_. “The Mesopotamians knew of no such beast, and the couch or bier could only have been made in Egypt, where the existence of Ammit was believed in and the fear of her was great.” In support of his opinion he quotes from the Papyrus of Hunefer--“Her forepart is crocodile,” and anyone familiar with the Judgment Scene will remember that this certainly is so. The trouble is that whatever the hideous monster of Tutankhamen’s tomb may represent, “her forepart” certainly is _not_ crocodile. It is ugly and sinister enough for anything; but no Egyptian craftsman would have dreamed of trying to pass this clumsy monster off as a representation of a crocodile--one of the most familiar of objects. Especially in view of the methods of construction involved--a point on which no man is better qualified than Petrie to pronounce an opinion--Budge seems to have done nothing to invalidate the Babylonian suggestion, which, for the rest, takes its place very naturally, as we shall see, in the explanation of the extraordinary wealth of furniture found in the tomb of one of the least famous Pharaohs of the XVIIIth Dynasty. The couches seem, to an unprejudiced mind, just such work as would be produced by a clever workman working on motives which were quite foreign to his usual practice, and therefore producing results which, while they have a distinct resemblance to the types which he was imitating, yet show these as seen and interpreted by an outsider, and not by one to whom they were parts of his normal training.