the land or to have the owner's permission to excavate. Any finds resulting from digs became the property of the finder. To perform digs in the site of the cavern, Durighello had bought the exclusive right from the land owner, the then Mufti of Sidon Mustapha Effendi. Cornelius Van Alen Van Dyck, an American missionary physican made it to the scene and made a transcript of the inscription which was first published in The Journal of Commerce. Ownership dispute Durighello's ownership of the sarcophagus was contested by the British vice-consul general in Syria, Habib Abela. The matter became political; in a letter dated 21 April 1855 the director of the French national museums, Count Émilien de Nieuwerkerke requested the intervention of Édouard Thouvenel, the French Ambassador to the Ottomans, stating that "It is in the best interest of the museum to possess the sarcophagus as it adds a new value at a time in which we start studying with great zeal Oriental antiquities, until now unknown in most of Europe." A commission was appointed by the Governor of the Sidon Eyalet Wamik Pasha to look into the case, and, according to the minutes of the meeting dated 24 April 1855, the dispute resolution efforts were transferred to a commission of European residents that unanimously voted in favor of Durighello and rejected the claims of Abela. The Journal of Commerce reported on the issue of the legal dispute:In the meantime, a controversy has arisen in regard to the ownership of the discovered monument, between the English and French Consuls in this place - one having made a contract with the owner of the land, by which he was entitled to whatever he should discover in it; and the other having engaged an Arab to dig for him, who came upon the sarcophagus in the other consul's limits, or , as the Californians would say, within his “claim". Péretié purchased the sarcophagus from Durighello and sold it to wealthy French nobleman and scholar Honoré de Luynes for . De Luynes donated the sarcophagus to the French government to be exhibited in the Louvre museum. Removal to the Louvre Péretié rushed the sarcophagus' transportation to France; a task that proved to be difficult with the available resources of the time. The bureaucratic task of removing the sarcophagus to France was facilitated with the intervention of Ferdinand de Lesseps, then consul-general of France in