An 11,000-year-old carving of a couple making love, a gender-fluid depiction of a Babylonian deity dating from 1800BC and busts of the Roman emperor Hadrian and his lover Antinous will feature in new LGBTQ-themed guided tours at the British Museum.

Around a dozen volunteers will take visitors to see objects also including an Athenian wine amphora with racy images of men getting intimate, and the museum’s most famous gay object, the Warren Cup, a Roman drinking vessel seen as the holy grail of gay history.

The initiative builds on LGBTQ audio tours at the museum. “We’ll see how they go, see what the demand is,” said Sarah Saunders, the head of learning and national programmes at the museum. “The more demand there is, the more we’ll do … it is really exciting.”

What the objects on the tour all demonstrated, she said, was “that same-sex love and desire and gender diversity have always been an integral part of human experience, but that the way they have been expressed has varied widely around the world and over time.”

The oldest object on the tour is the Ain Sakhri Lovers, an 11,000-year-old calcite pebble found in a cave in the Judean desert and made by hunter-gatherers known as Natufians. It is the world’s oldest known depiction of a couple having sex. The genders are unclear and open to interpretation.

Considerably more recent, although still 200 years old, are chocolate cups and saucers that belonged to Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, two Irish aristocrats who eloped to Wales in 1778 and are known as the Ladies of Llangollen.

The Warren Cup shows two scenes of men making love. It survived because it was buried somewhere near Bethlehem in the 1st century AD, It resurfaced in the 19th century and entered the collection of a rich gay collector, Ned Warren. The museum purchased it in 1999 for £1.8m.

Hal Messel with his Pride cups and, centre, the Warren Cup. Photograph: Natasha Livingstone/AP

Eight solid silver cups cast in the shape of the Warren Cup were unveiled in the museum’s Enlightenment gallery on Thursday. The “Pride cups”, each tinted to represent a different colour of the original Pride rainbow flag, were made by Hal Messel, a silversmith, and will be sold to raise funds for the campaigning charity Stonewall and for the museum’s work with the LGBTQ community.

Messel said the project was about “tackling assumptions and raising awareness around how gender identity and sexual orientation continue to remain on the fringes of so much contemporary art.”

He said it was interesting to note that the Warren Cup was considered more provocative by some today than it was by the Romans 2,000 years ago.

Stonewall’s chief executive, Ruth Hunt, said: “For something as establishment as the British Museum to get behind this is is incredibly powerful. This project has helped spark an important conversation about how attitudes have changed and how much work there is still left to do.”