Dish with design of horse and cheetah

In Iran and India cheetahs were used in much the same way as dogs for hunting game. Depictions of cheetahs appear on many ceramics, but in this dish the cheetah has been transformed into a fantastic animal. Despite the breakage of this bowl, the cheetah can be reconstructed on the basis of the remaining fragments and by comparing it with other intact bowls of the same type. This cheetah is related to composite creatures depicted in Iran as early as 1000 BCE that combine different animal attributes.