to the first century C.E.", while on the same basis (the use of swallow-tail serifs, the almost triangular Φ with prolongation below, ligatures between N, H, and M, and above all the peculiar form of the letter omega) another is equally certain it dates from the second century CE, and makes comparisons to dated inscriptions of 127/8 and 149/50 CE. History of the stele's discovery and exhibition 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). Word accent A German scholar Otto Crusius in 1893, shortly after the publication of this inscription, was the first to observe that the music of this song as well as that of the hymns of Mesomedes tends to follow the pitch of the word accents. The publication of the two Delphic hymns in the same year confirmed this tendency. Thus in this epitaph, in most of the words, the accented syllable is higher in pitch than the syllable which follows; and the circumflex accents in , and have a falling contour within the syllable, just as described by the 1st century BC rhetorician Dionysius of Halicarnassus.