Two centuries ago, as Caspar Reuvens was establishing the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden (RMO), an aristocratic military officer in the diplomatic corps (i.e. J. E. Humbert 1821) extracted Punic inscriptions for the museum while a scholar atvLeiden University (i.e. H. A. Hamaker 1828) interpreted them. Such a combination of military-antiquarian interest and scholarly study developed in a competitive environment, as French officers were surveying Egypt and seizing artifacts for the Musée Napoléon (now the Musée du Louvre) and as the Earl of Elgin was seizing artifacts from the Athenian acropolis in Ottoman Greece for the British Museum. The French colonization of Algeria (1830) accelerated antiquarian interest in North Africa. Within the diplomatic corps to the bey of Tunis, competition with Humbert arose as the British consul Thomas Reade aggressively extracted inscriptions (cf. G. T. Temple 1835) and as the Danish military attaché C. T. Falbe surveyed Carthage (1833) and removed inscriptions to the royal cabinet of antiquities, now the Nationalmuseet Danmarks (NMD). In an early form of collections exchange, plaster casts of inscriptions were sent between Leiden and Copenhagen (Halbertsma 1995, 2003). Note that casts of Leiden inscriptions later formed an early kernel of the study collection at the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East (HMANE).

  The philologist Wilhelm Gesenius visited London and Leiden in 1835 to autopsy Phoenician inscriptions and/or their casts (Lehmann 2013). Two years later he published his survey, Scripturæ linguæque phoeniciæ monumenta (or Monumenta 1837), which gave sequential Latin numeration, site-by-site in order of discovery, and thereby assigned to these inscriptions what would become their vulgate names. In Leiden he was able to study nine of the first thirteen Punic inscriptions known from Carthage (Carthaginensis) and five of eight Neo-Punic inscriptions from North Africa (Numidica). The correspondence between Gesenius' common names and later catalogs is consistent but not always precise (in part because his Carthaginensis decima would be omitted as Libyan/Numidian rather than Punic). The following table attempts to clarify those correspondences, concerning his catalog nᵒˢ46-66 and his appendix nᵒˢ81-84. For the next five decades and beyond, inscriptions that Gesenius had cataloged in Leiden remained foundational for the study of Phoenician-Punic.