The museum's story begins in 1743, when the Leiden lawyer Gerard van Papenbroek died and left his collection of about 150 antiquities to Leiden University. For half a century the bequest sat poorly cared for, until Leiden created what was, by some accountings, the world's first chair in archaeology and gave the post in 1818 to a 25-year-old classicist named Caspar Reuvens. Reuvens treated the Papenbroek collection less as an inheritance to display and more as a foundation to build on. Within a decade he had assembled the core of a national archaeological museum, badgering the Dutch government, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and his own university for transfers. The collection outgrew its housing in the botanical gardens, where damp damaged the marble. It outgrew the Museum of Natural History. Reuvens kept refusing inadequate solutions and proposing impossible ones. He died unexpectedly in 1835, at 42, before his fight for a proper building was won. His student Conrad Leemans finished it, and the museum opened in its current 18th-century mansion in 1838.

The most consequential acquisitions came not from Leiden archaeologists but from two unusual agents working for the Dutch government in the 1820s. Jean Emile Humbert was an engineer who had served Tunisia's bey and developed a passion for Carthage's ruins. The Dutch government, on Reuvens's recommendation, sent Humbert back to Tunisia from 1822 to 1824 with state funds to collect and excavate. He returned with eight major statues that still anchor the museum's classical galleries. A second Humbert expedition was supposed to return to Tunisia but the agent preferred Italy. From there he negotiated something extraordinary: the d'Anastasy Collection of Egyptian antiquities, bought for roughly 115,000 guilders - the largest single acquisition of either Humbert's or Reuvens's careers. The collection arrived in Leiden and made the museum suddenly, internationally significant in Egyptology. Today the Egyptian galleries include the Ipuwer Papyrus, a hieratic text describing chaos in an unnamed Egyptian intermediate period, and a wealth of funerary material that Egyptologists still come from around the world to study.

Like every great encyclopedic museum, the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden carries inside it a long, complicated conversation about how its collections came to be in the Netherlands at all. The 19th-century acquisitions reflect 19th-century realities: agents working with rough oversight, dealers who admitted to forgeries, colonial powers competing for objects from countries that did not yet exist as modern states. The Taffeh temple stands as a counter-example - a gift offered freely in 1969 in thanks for help saving a much larger heritage. But many other objects carry more difficult histories. In recent years, museums across the Netherlands have begun publishing detailed provenance research, repatriating disputed objects, and reckoning with the human and ethical dimensions of their collections - particularly where human remains are involved. The conversation is ongoing and often uncomfortable, and the museum has been part of it. It is the kind of work a great museum has to do honestly if its collections are going to mean anything in the next century the way they have in the last.

The museum's permanent galleries are arranged by civilization: Egypt, the ancient Near East, Etruria, Greece, Rome, and the early Netherlands - prehistoric, Roman, and medieval. The Egyptian collection includes mummies, painted coffins, and the offering chapel of Hetepherakhty, a complete Old Kingdom tomb interior reconstructed in the museum. The classical galleries hold red-figure vases bought by Leemans in 1839 from the Lucien Bonaparte collection. The Netherlands galleries trace what is now Dutch soil from the first hunter-gatherers through the Roman frontier on the Rhine to the medieval towns that became Leiden, Utrecht, and Amsterdam. One of the strangest objects is a gilded silver phalera made in Thrace around 100 BC, found by a farmer in Limburg in 1850, evidence of trade or migration that ranged from the Black Sea to the Low Countries two millennia before anyone wrote it down. The temple in the central hall is the showpiece. The rest of the museum is what makes it serious.

The museum sits at Rapenburg 28, on one of the prettiest canals in Leiden, a five-minute walk from the train station and a five-minute walk from the Pieterskerk where the Pilgrims worshipped before sailing to Plymouth. Leiden is a small city that has, somehow, accumulated more academic and cultural firepower per square kilometer than almost anywhere in the Netherlands - the university founded in 1575 as a reward for surviving the Spanish siege, Hortus Botanicus from 1590, a series of world-class museums, and the canals that still organize the city as they did when Rembrandt was born here in 1606. The Rijksmuseum van Oudheden is the kind of museum a city of this size should not, by rights, be able to hold. Leiden holds it anyway, with quiet seriousness, the way it holds the rest of its outsize history.