Islamicist and head of the Oriental department, British Museum, 1945-1969. Gray was the son of Charles Gray, a surgeon in the (British) Royal Army Medical Corps, and Florence Elworthy Cowell. After attending Bradfield College he entered New College, Oxford University, graduating in 1927. The following year he worked at the British Academy excavations of the great palace of the Byzantine emperors in Constantinople. He attempted study in Vienna under the singular Vienna-school scholar Josef Rudolf Thomas Strzygowski.

Archaeologist and historian of Russian and Near Eastern (Egypt, Assyria) art. Piotrovsky graduated from Leningrad University with a degree from the historical philology department. After receiving his degree, he joined the staff of the History of Material Culture, and went on to become a curator at the State Hermitage Museum in 1931, where he would publish his research on the history of the Hermitage's collections. As an archaeologist, Piotrovsky led expeditions to Nubia and the Kamir blur.

Archaeologist and historian of Persian art. Pope was the son of a Baptist minister, Louis Atherton Pope and his mother, Imogene Titus Pope. He graduated from Brown University in 1904, remaining on the faculty to teach philosophy. He married Bertha Clark, later the author Bertha Damon, in 1905. Pope attended graduate school at Brown, Cornell and Harvard, taught the University of California 1910-1917. After his divorce to Clark, he married fellow Persianist art historian, Phyllis Ackerman, in 1920. In 1923, Pope was appointed director of the San Francisco Museum.

Specialist in ancient architecture of the Near East. Student of Robert Koldewey. Professor of the History of Architecture at the Technical University of Dresden, 1920-1945. Professor at the Technical University of Karlsruhe, 1949-1950.