Gepaipyris II? Once More about the Silver Plate from Scythian Neapolis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article is devoted to the study of a silver plate with an inscription of Queen Gepaipyris, found in the excavations of Scythian Neapolis in 1959. It has up to now been thought that the plate belonged to the Bosporan Queen Gepaipyris, ruling in AD 37-38, and was probably a diplomatic gift during negotiations with the Scythians. The analysis of the shape of the plate, its stylistic features and the composition of its decoration give grounds for dating the plate from Neapolis (Cat. No. 1, Fig. 1) within a broad framework of the second half of the 2 nd and first half of the 3 rd century AD, but more probably to the second half of the 2 nd than to the first half of the 3 rd century. The distribution of plates, dishes (Fig. 4), cups (Fig. 7) and bowls (Fig. 8) with Dionysiac friezes allows us, with a high degree of probability, to suggest that the Neapolis plate was manufactured in a workshop located in Gaul. From the viewpoint of palaeography the inscription on the plate from Neapolis (Cat. No. 1, Figs. 1, 3-4 ; 9, 10 ; 10, 1 ) also cannot be dated earlier than to the 2 nd century AD, the most probable date being within the last decades of the 2 nd or the first half of the 3 rd century AD. The suggested dating of the plate provides grounds for abandoning, without hesitation, the unfounded suggestion about its belonging to a Bosporan Queen, ruling in the second quarter of the 1 st century AD. The dating of the silver plate from Scythian Neapolis, based on the analysis of its shape, decoration, the palaeographic features of the inscription and the specific form used for the designation of its weight, fits in well, in general, with the dating of its archaeological context. The plate was found in the debris of tiles and stone to the north of the buildings of the so-called North Palace of Neapolis, which existed in the last quarter of the 2 nd and the first quarter of the 3 rd century AD and could have been a residence of the Bosporan governor. The name Gepaipyris (Γηπαιπυρίς, Γηπαίπυρος, Γηπεπυρίς) is Thracian, rather rare and occurs in only four inscriptions found in Thrace and dated mainly to the 2 nd -3 rd centuries AD. As there could not have been a queen in Thrace, since it was a province of the Roman Empire in the given period, we can only suppose that a woman with the Thracian name Gepaipyris was, most probably, either a so far unknown queen, who once ruled the Bosporan Kingdom or a wife of one of the Bosporan kings. If we adopt the first suggestion about the reign of Gepaipyris II in the Bosporan Kingdom, then that could have taken place theoretically between 170/171 and 174/175 AD, i.e . between Tiberius Julius Eupator and Sauromates II. This is the only chronological gap within the period under discussion, for which dated gold staters are unknown. Certainly, Gepaipyris could have been, given the dating of the plate and the inscription on it, the wife of one of three kings of the Bosporan Kingdom: Tiberius Julius Eupator (154-170 AD), Sauromates II (174-210 AD) or Rhescuporis III (210-226 AD), most probably, in this case, one of the last two. The appearance in the Bosporus of a silver plate, manufactured in Gaul, is not surprising, if we remember that precisely in the 2 nd -3 rd centuries AD articles from workshops located in Gaul and in the Rhine area made up a considerable part of the imported glass and bronze items found in the Bosporus and neighbouring area.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".