Around 1820, American wildlife artist and naturalist John James Audubon declared his intention to paint every bird species in North America. The result of this ambition was Birds of America, published between 1827 and 1838, and featuring 435 life-size, hand-coloured prints. The book’s large size (almost 1m high) and its publication as a series of folios has resulted in very few complete volumes remaining to this day. Audubon was and is a controversial figure. Many of his practices were criticised by the naturalist community and he profited from the ownership of enslaved people during his life-time. However, the book itself...

2500 years ago Persia (modern day Iran) came into being under the guiding hand of Cyrus the Great whose empire, marked not by military expansion but by embracing other cultures through trade, reached from the Balkans and Egypt in the west to Central Asia and the Indus Valley in the east.