The Epitaph was discovered in 1883 by Sir W. M. Ramsay in Tralleis, a small town near Aydın, Turkey. According to one source the stele was then lost and rediscovered in Smyrna in 1922, at about the end of the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922. According to another source the stele, having first been discovered during the building of the railway next to Aydın, had first remained in the possession of the building firm's director, Edward Purser, where Ramsay found and published about it; in about 1893, as it "was broken at the bottom, its base was sawn off straight so that it could stand and serve as a pedestal for Mrs Purser's flowerpots"; this caused the loss of one line of text, i.e., while the stele would now stand upright, the grinding had obliterated the last line of the inscription. The stele next passed to Edward Purser's son-in-law, Mr Young, who kept it in Buca, Smyrna. It remained there until the defeat of the Greeks, having been taken by the Dutch Consul for safe keeping during the war; the Consul's son-in-law later brought it by way of Constantinople and Stockholm to The Hague; it remained there until 1966, when it was acquired by the Department of Antiquities of the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen. This is where the stele has been located since (inventory number: 14897).