Cautioning the ministry not to buy at any price, the Rottiers collection was eventually sold for the sum of 12,000 guilders and placed in the National Museum of Antiquities.

Rottiers also repeatedly admitted to selling forgeries and misleading buyers, but told Reuvens that he would never do so to him and that his earlier mistakes were youthful folly.

During a lengthy stay on Rhodes, he studied and described the medieval architecture, large parts of which would later be destroyed, making the drawings commissioned by Rottiers invaluable.

Raised to the Order of the Netherlands Lion, with instructions from Reuvens and with a state-funded budget Humbert would collect and excavate antiquities in Tunisia from 1822 to 1824.

After a lengthy period of negotiations by the Dutch ambassador in Rome and Humbert with agents of d'Anastasy the collection was eventually sold for roughly 115.000 guilders.

The rebellion and seceding of Belgium in 1830 were costly matters for the king, and little to no room was found for adventurous expeditions or excavations.

[5] He left behind a young museum with a scholarly renowned collection, which had grown from the Papenbroek inheritance to now include a large amount of Etruscan, Egyptian, Carthaginian, Roman, Greek and other items.

Prospects for continuing the growth of the collection looked bleak, however, after royal interest waned and with the enormous cost of the d'Anastasy deal still in mind.

Leemans found a solution by using the official gazette to appeal private collectors, Dutch ambassadors and consuls for donations and aid in building the collection.

[6] Finding an adequate building for the archaeological collection had been a matter of ongoing strife between Reuvens, the trustees of the museum and the Dutch government.

When Reuvens was first appointed professor of archaeology, and thereby curator of the Papenbroek collection, the antiquities were housed in a building of the botanical gardens of the university.

The damp atmosphere caused serious damage to the sculptures, however, and the collection had already outgrown its housing which resulted in several statues being placed outside.

Several other solutions were sought, including redecorating a medieval church and giving Reuvens part of a new academy building.

Reuvens argued against all of these, using Leiden's thriving academic climate in the humanities as a main argument for keeping the collection there.

Eventually, Amsterdam became the prime candidate, being the capital of the Netherlands and Brussels having seceded from the kingdom along with the rest of Belgium.

In November 1835, a turning event occurred for the museum when the university bought an 18th-century mansion and offered to place the collection there.

Budgetary problems and the difficulties of transporting some of the largest pieces through the city were eventually overcome and, in August 1838, the National Museum of Antiquities finally had its official opening for the public.