Тhis colossal lion, carved from a single block of marble, weighs some six tons and is now on display in the Great Court of the Museum. It was originally on the top of a funerary monument at Knidos, set on a headland with a sheer cliff-face that falls around 200 feet into the sea. The monument itself was square with a circular interior chamber and a stepped-pyramid roof. It is a type of funerary monument inspired by the greater tomb of Maussollos, built about 350 BC at Halikarnassos, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and less than a day’s sail from Knidos.

Sculpted stone reliefs illustrating the sporting exploits of the last great Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal (reigned 668-631 BC) were created for his palace at Nineveh (in modern-day northern Iraq). The panels, which probably originally decorated one of his private apartments, depict a lion hunt: the release of the lions, the ensuing chase and the subsequent kill. In ancient Assyria, lion-hunting was considered the sport of kings, symbolic of the monarch’s duty to protect and fight for his people. Inscriptions from the reign of Ashurbanipal II (883-859 BC) claim that he killed a total of 450 lions.

This six-panel Japanese folding screen is painted in ink, colour and gold leaf on paper. It depicts tigers crossing a river, a subject inspired by an ancient Chinese legend that if a mother tiger gives birth to three cubs, one will always be a leopard (hyo). This scene shows the mother tiger taking her cubs across the river, being careful not to leave the ferocious hyo alone with the other cubs.

This type of long scroll-painting was used by itinerant storytellers in rural Bengal as a visual aid to a spoken narration. Storytelling using painted scrolls or panels has a long history in India and is known from at least the second century BC.

This proof-wood engraving by the Dalziel Brothers is an illustration to page 91 of the famous children’s book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). It shows the meeting between Alice and the Cheshire Cat. The author, Charles Dodgson, who used the pen-name Lewis Carroll, originally provided his own illustrations to the books, but while the type was being set, he was persuaded to employ a more competent draughtsman.

This engraving is one of the most famous prints of a cat. Visscher was a professional engraver of his own and other artists’ designs. This was an unusual occupation in XVII-century Holland where artists generally adopted the less demanded technique of etching. Contemporaries and later connoisseurs eagerly collected Visscher’s work, though they arouse little interest as works of art today.

These marble greyhounds are among the most charming representations of “man’s best friend” to come down to us from antiquity. They were excavated at a place called “Dog Mountain” near Civita Lavinia (modern Lanuvio), Italy.

This is a particularly fine example of the many statues of cats found from Egypt. It has gold rings in its ears and nose, a silvered collar round its neck and a silver protective wedjat eye amulet.

This life-sized terrapin is carved from a single piece of jade and was found in Allahabad, India. It was probably made to be an ornament for the garden of a Mughal palace.

This diorite sculpture is around one and a half meters long and is one of the largest known representations of a scarab beetle. The scarab is one of the enduring symbols of Ancirnt Egypt, representing rebirth and associated with the rising sun. as a hieroglyph the scarab has the phonetic value HPR (kheper) which as a verb means “to come into being”. According to one creation myth, the new-born sun was called Khepri and took the form of a man with a scarab head.