J. Abdo Debbas was a Greek Orthodox Syrian who served as American vice-consul at Tarsus in the south of what is now Turkey.
He was educated partly in Malta at a Christian school that aimed to teach young men to return to their own communities to preach the gospel.
[4] In January 1870, Debbas wrote to J. Augustus Johnston, the American consul in Beirut, to offer to the U.S. government a Roman marble sarcophagus with garlands that he had found in 1863.
After meeting John Taylor Johnston and other founders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it was agreed that the item should be received by them.
Transit to the coast at Mersin was arranged by Debbas using a team of sixteen buffalo to pull the sarcophagus on a wagon.