The British Museum is planning its first exhibition devoted to the horse, with a display tracing our favourite animal's story across thousands of years of human history.

The free exhibition, titled 'The Horse: Ancient Arabia to the Modern World', will run from 24 May to 30 September and has been timed to coincide with the Olympic Games, but has also been conceived as a diamond jubilee gift to a celebrated horse lover, the Queen. 

The exhibition will range from a stylised figure that decorated a 3,000-year-old harness, to the Georgian thoroughbreds Hambletonian and Diamond, immortalised on a gambler's gaming chip – appropriately since Hambletonian won a staggering 3,000 guinea prize when he beat Diamond by a short head at Newmarket in 1799.

Curator John Curtis said: "There are probably horses somewhere in every gallery in the museum, from Assyrian sculptures to coins. They're so familiar and ubiquitous they mostly go unnoticed. We want to bring them together and show their importance in history. The horse was an engine of human development and, until a generation ago, part of the everyday experience of life even in the heart of London."

There were so many horses in Victorian London that one solemn calculation concluded that the city would become uninhabitable by the turn of the 20th century, buried under a rising tide of dung. "And now they're gone completely in one lifetime," co-curator Nigel Tallis said sadly. "Many city dwellers will never see a horse in the street except police horses and the odd procession, and yet from mews to horse troughs, the city is still full of evidence of their day." The exhibition will bring together scores of horses from the museum's own collection, including a miniature gold chariot drawn by four horses, made around 2,500 years ago, part of the Oxus treasure hoard of ancient Persian gold."

Quick Link

• Read more about 'The Horse: Ancient Arabia to the Mordern World' exhibition at www.guardian.co.uk
• Visit the British Museum website