The Egyptian Museum of Leiden is a museum on Breedstraat whose varied collection draws the boys into the material worlds of ancient and modern Egypt. Its abundance of domestic objects, royal ornaments, and human and animal mummies makes the visit a concrete encounter with history, while relics from Rome and Greece broaden the view beyond Egypt.

Setting and Visit

The museum is chosen as the boys’ next destination after Lambert van Mounen consults with Ben. Lambert identifies its location on Breedstraat, and the group agrees to go there. After a brief mix-up in which Lambert realizes that they have walked past it without seeing the boys, the party meets at the museum and begins exploring its extensive collection.

The visit is part of a day spent among Leiden’s museums. The Egyptian Museum offers an encounter with artifacts and ancient life; after leaving it, the boys go to another museum to look at natural-history specimens. That movement from objects made and used by people to fossil animals, skeletons, birds, and minerals gives the excursion a widening scope, though the boys themselves can only take in what their limited knowledge allows.

The Egyptian Collection

The collection includes household utensils, clothing, weapons, musical instruments, sarcophagi, and mummies of men, women, and animals, including cats and ibexes. Together, these objects suggest several dimensions of life and death rather than presenting Egypt through a single kind of relic. The boys also see a massive gold armlet once worn by an Egyptian king, alongside jewels and trinkets associated with Pharaoh’s daughter and the departure of the children of Israel.

The armlet makes the collection’s reach across time especially striking: the narration imagines that some of the people represented by the mummies may once have moved through the streets of Thebes while the king’s ornament was in use. The museum thus brings distant lives into material proximity, through things that were worn, handled, or laid with the dead.

Other Antiquities and Significance

The museum’s holdings are not limited to Egypt. The boys encounter relics from Rome and Greece, including Roman pottery discovered while digging near The Hague, evidence of Roman settlement in the region. Ben and Lambert have often visited the British Museum, yet they are still surprised by the richness of the Leiden collection. Their familiarity with a major museum does not make this one seem secondary; the visit instead enlarges their sense of what local collections can hold.

The museum’s role in the episode is to make learning tangible without implying that the boys have mastered what they see. They examine and compare objects, gaining a new insight into Egyptian life, while the later visit to the natural-history collection leaves them aware of how much they do not know. Even a mouse skeleton puzzles Jacob. The excursion therefore joins the pleasure of looking with an awareness of the limits of casual observation: the collections offer knowledge, but seeing their contents is only the beginning of understanding them.