The two fragmentary stelae here published were discovered in the course of the excavations of the British School at Kynosarges in the winters of 1895 and 1896. One had been built into a Roman wall, the other into a late Hellenic watercourse. Within the area excavated there was no trace of any tombs of the period to which these reliefs may be referred, nor was any such trace to be expected. But the masons may very well have picked them up from close at hand; originally they may have stood by the side of a neighbouring road; indeed, they may be two of the actual tombstones desecrated by the soldiers of Philip.

The first of these two stelae attaches itself to an early group of gravestones described and dated by Köhler in the Athenische Mittheilungen of 1885. The letters which remain of the inscription run …τησικ… (perhaps Σ]τησικ[λ༵ια or Κ]τησικ[λ༵ια) and end with a second σ on the other side of the break. The H is evidently the Ionic H, and the sigma has four limbs; but this need not prevent the conclusion suggested by the style, that the stele was erected some time, but not a long time, before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War.