Austen Henry Layard

Austen Henry Layard dug up ancient cities in the 1840s while most people still thought ruins were just old piles of rubble. His watercolor drawings don’t just show what Assyrian palaces looked like—they piece together whole rooms from fist-sized fragments he found in the dirt. One sheet turns a pile of carved bricks into the doorway of a 3,000-year-old temple, complete with a lintel still clinging to its lion relief. If you’ve ever squinted at a pile of stones and tried to imagine the palace that once stood there, tap his “Hall in an Assyrian Temple.”