The main complex sits on Chambers Street in Edinburgh's Old Town, where the Victorian Royal Museum and the modern Museum of Scotland are linked into a single visit. The Royal Museum spans global geology, archaeology, natural history, science, technology, and art. The Museum of Scotland focuses on the country's own past and people. Beyond Chambers Street, the network extends: the National Museum of Flight at East Fortune in East Lothian (where the Concorde lives), the National Museum of Rural Life at Wester Kittochside farm in South Lanarkshire, and the National War Museum inside Edinburgh Castle. The collection centre at Granton opened in 1996 and offers guided tours into the kind of storage rooms most museums never let the public see.

The official highlights list reads like a treasure inventory from a particularly ambitious heist. An Assyrian relief of King Ashurnasirpal II, hauled out of Nimrud by Austen Henry Layard in the 1840s and gifted to Scotland by the chloroform pioneer James Young Simpson. A Boulton and Watt steam engine, one of the machines that made the Industrial Revolution. The Bute mazer, a medieval Scottish drinking bowl. The Hunterston Brooch, Celtic silverwork from the 8th century. The Monymusk reliquary, a wooden casket that once held a relic of Saint Columba. Twelve of the Lewis chessmen. Prince Charlie's targe and backsword, carried during the 1745 rising. The Galloway Hoard, the richest Viking-age hoard ever found in Britain or Ireland.

Then there are the modern arrivals. Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, was born at the Roslin Institute outside Edinburgh in 1996; she died in 2003 and now stands in a glass case at Chambers Street. Concorde G-BOAA, one of only fourteen production aircraft ever built, was flown into East Fortune airfield in 2004 and became the centrepiece of the National Museum of Flight. The Qurneh burial collection, discovered by Flinders Petrie on 30 December 1908, is the only complete ancient Egyptian royal burial held outside Egypt. The Mauritius blue pigeon, extinct since the 19th century, survives in three skins worldwide. One of them is here.

National Museums Scotland is an executive non-departmental public body of the Scottish Government, funded through the Education and Lifelong Learning Directorate and governed by a board of trustees. The structure is dry; the holdings are anything but. The point of a national collection is that it tells the story a country chooses to tell about itself. Scotland's story, on the evidence of these objects, is that everything connects: medieval craftsmanship to Industrial Revolution iron, Highland weaponry to genetic engineering, ancient Mesopotamia to a supersonic airliner. The collection is one of the largest in Europe, and it is free to visit. On any given day, the queue for the chessmen winds back through the Hawthornden Court.