ABSTRACT
In February 1821 Caspar Jacob Christiaan Reuvens had a meeting with Jean Emile Humbert, like Bernard Eugene Antoine Rottiers another officer who had returned to his native ground after the long years of political unrest. This meeting led to more than fourteen years of intense co-operation between the scholar and the officer and opened new prospects for the development of the museum. Humbert was born in 1771 in a family of Swiss Huguenot origin, which had come to the Netherlands at the end of the seventeenth century. Jean Emile Humbert was trained as a military engineer in ’s-Hertogenbosch and Maastricht. One of the targets of Humbert’s expedition to Tunisia was the excavations on the Carthaginian peninsula, aimed at clarifying the topography of the Punic city. Humbert’s reluctance to go to Tunisia also had other reasons, which were unknown to his principals. In Tunis Antoine Nijssen was seriously ill and had asked to be relieved of the consulate.
