They were discovered by Luigi Palma di Cesnola during his tenure as the United States Consul to Cyprus from 1865 to 1871.
[2] The Cesnola Collection was brought to public attention for the first time in 1870 when Emil Rödiger presented a report to the Prussian Academy of Sciences,[3] and in 1872 Paul Schröder (Philologe) published facsimiles of the texts.
[4] The collection was acquired by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1872.
Many were then published in the 1880s in the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, although CIS inscriptions 24, 26 and 28 and RES 389, 1518 and 1519 are now missing - i.e. they are not in the museum and some were not in the collection when it was studied in 1885.
[5] They were first systematically classified by John Myres in 1914, and then again by Javier Teixidor in 1976.