BMCR 2006.10.16

Response: Response-Article: The Album of Bosporan Inscriptions on trial: A further indictment

Response to 2007.04.30

Response by

In an extensive review article published in Vestnik Drevney Istoriy ( Review of Ancient History) 4 (2005), 179-198, we thought we had said, in Russian, all that we needed to say about the Corpus Inscriptionum Regni Bosporani: Album Imaginum (St. Petersburg: Bibliotheca Classica Petropolitana, 2004), edited by A. Gavrilov, N. Pavlichenko, D. Keyer & A. Karlin.1 We thought we had said all we needed to say both about the volume’s scholarship and about its editors’ breach of scholarly ethics.

But Gavrilov, Pavlichenko and Keyer have now intervened, in English, in Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2006.02.15, to defend both the quality of the published Album and the surprising secrecy surrounding its preparation. They do this in response to Askold I. Ivantchik’s remarks (BMCR 2005.11.20) about Eleanor Dickey’s review (BMCR 2005.10.41) of the volume in question. The review itself was courteous, but the author’s inability to read Russian and lack of epigraphical expertise limited the scope of her comments. (She had taken the view, very reasonably, that BMCR should at least announce the appearance of the volume, even if it could not find a scholar with enough Russian to evaluate it properly.) Ivantchik then made his comments in his capacity as editor in chief of an on-going International Union of Academies project (of which Gavrilov et al. were well aware) to publish with Ausonius in Bordeaux a complete new edition of the Greek and Latin inscriptions themselves, accompanied by an Album of photographs more accurate and reliable than those in the Album that Dickey reviewed.

The reply to Ivantchik by Gavrilov et al. in BMCR 2006.02.15 includes a number of assertions — some old and familiar to us, some new — which do not correspond to the truth and are liable to mislead readers unaware of the issues at stake. Much as we might wish to remain silent, we cannot in good conscience do so.

1. In replying to Ivantchik, Gavrilov et al. acknowledge that it is a serious matter to find themselves accused (a) of having taken from the Archive of the Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences materials collected and worked on by their colleagues Levinskaya and Tokhtas’ev, so as to use these materials and the work done on them without their colleagues’ permission — without indeed even informing them — and accused (b) of having for so long kept it a secret that they were preparing to publish the materials to which these same colleagues had dedicated much time and effort. In view of this acknowledgement, one might expect either appropriate apologies by the editors of the CIRB-Album or a convincing refutation of the charge. But all they have to say is the following:

This is a serious accusation, but it has already been refuted both by the Institute for History of the Russian Academy of Sciences and by the Branch [sc. Section] of History and Philology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. (BMCR 2006.02.15)

The claim is false. There has been no such refutation. None at all.

Normal practice in such a case would be to set up a commission to investigate the charges. In both institutions our attempts to get one created were completely ignored; nor do we know of any attempt by Gavrilov to find a forum where he could defend himself. Ignored also was the plea for a thorough investigation sent by four distinguished Western colleagues to Academician A.P. Derevyanko, Secretary of the History and Philology Section of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The signatories were Professors Fergus Millar, Glen Bowersock (both Foreign Members of the Russian Academy of Sciences as well as Fellows of their own national Academies), Myles Burnyeat and Joyce Reynolds (both Fellows of the British Academy). We are grateful to these scholars for allowing us to reproduce the text of their communication, as follows:

We, the undersigned Academicians from Britain and the USA, write to express our concern and hope that within your Academy there will be a formal discussion of A.K. Gavrilov’s newly published Black Sea album. The Russian Academy of Sciences is the first, but it is not the only, body whose honour is at stake. One cannot pass lightly by a charge of plagiarism, to the effect that years of work by two respected St. Petersburg scholars have been marginalised. One cannot disregard the negligence of publishing photographs of unrestored stones against the expressed wishes of the museums responsible for them. It is for the sake of the whole learned world that we look to you to produce a clear judgement on this troubling case.

It was sent as two faxes, dated 17 Jan 2005, the day before the Section of History and Philology of the Russian Academy in Moscow was due to meet to consider the report of the Presidium’s commission of inspection on the work of its St. Petersburg Institute of History, in the context of a general review by the Academy of all its Institutes. It was known that this St. Petersburg report contained serious criticism of the conduct of Gavrilov and his team.

The faxes undoubtedly went through, but were never acknowledged. Six months later, on 5 July 2005, Myles Burnyeat sent a letter (in Russian) asking for confirmation that the original faxes had been received. Again, no answer.

In the event, when the report was submitted to the Academy meeting on January 18th 2005, Professor Ivantchik, a Corresponding Member of the Academy, spoke to endorse its conclusions, but the response from the assembled Academicians was silence. Not a word was said, either for or against the report, for or against Ivantchik’s comments thereon. Silence is no refutation. The only answer available to work with is the one Gavrilov and his youthful assistants have now published in this journal.

2. They tell readers of BMCR that our work consisted in a re-organization of the collection of illustrative materials plus the addition of 24 new photographs (BMCR 2006.02.15; the CIRB-Album, p. 411, speaks of 55 new photographs, which is nearer the truth). The impression they convey is that of a new systematization of old materials which had been carefully preserved in some different systematization. The reality (rather better acknowledged in the CIRB-Album, p. 410) is that the Bosporan illustrations were scattered around in total chaos. It took us two years to get it all together again. The task involved looking through the desks of colleagues in two St Petersburg Institutes (the Institute of History and the Institute of the History of Material Culture), where we found a mass of materials which had been completely forgotten. Then we had to select the best photographs from a total of over three thousand. Finally, the selected photographs had to be matched up with the appropriate inscriptions. The result of this work was an Album ready to go to press, which in 1992 was dispatched for publication in Germany.

We are genuinely surprised by Gavrilov’s remarks on this episode. As a fellow-member of Levinskaya’s Department (Classical Antiquity) in the St Petersburg Institute of History, he both witnessed and participated in all Departmental decisions concerning ‘the German project’, the proposed Album of photographs. He was even to some extent a participant in the project itself, as he records in the CIRB-Album, p. 410, n. 136: he was due to write up-to-date scholarly and interpretative comments on some Greek metrical inscriptions from the Bosporan Kingdom for the Addenda et Corrigenda section of the planned publication. He knows very well,

(a) that the late Berndt Funk, an ancient historian with extremely good connections both in the Soviet Union and in the German Democratic Republic, held oral discussions with the Akademie-Verlag: a detailed account is given under the heading ‘The Photoarchiv of the CIRB in Reunified Germany’ on pp. 409-11 of the CIRB-Album;

(b) that they reached what Funk reported as ‘full agreement’ on publication (the CIRB-Album, p. 410, lines 3-5, acknowledges, while BMCR 2006.02.15 implicitly denies, an ‘outline agreement’);

(c) that once Funk had finished a German translation of our Addenda et Corrigenda, we (Levinskaya and Tokhtas’ev) were to travel to Germany to sign the publication agreement and lend our editorial assistance to the process of getting the Album into print (with or without Gavrilov’s still missing contribution).

Yet he has suddenly started looking for traces of those negotiations in the form of written correspondence. Predictably, he is told by a representative of the Akademie-Verlag that there are none, so he proceeds to claim, ‘The state of the materials prepared by I.A. Levinskaya and S.R. Tokhtas’ev seems not to have been finished enough for publication’ (BMCR 2006.02.15). In short, he infers: no official, written agreement, therefore no finished work!

Gavrilov knows better than anyone else that, without clear agreement on the German side and an Album fully prepared for launching the process of publication, neither the St. Petersburg Institute of History nor its Department of Classical Antiquity would have granted permission for so bulky a collection to be taken out of the country (it was a two-person job, too heavy for one to lift).

2. Gavrilov and his co-authors assert (BMCR 2005.11.20) that a letter dated 20.02.04 from the Kerch State Historico-Cultural Reserve (Museum), site of by far the largest collection of Bosporan monuments, is not the protest that Ivantchik took it to be, ‘as can be seen from the fact that according to an agreement (1999) between the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Kerch State Historico-Cultural Reserve the latter put at the editors’ disposal the inventory numbers of [the] inscriptions in question’. Now from the fact that in 1999 the museum communicated the inventory numbers it by no means follows that some years later it could not protest against the publication of an inadequate Album. But lack of logic is only half the trouble. What actually took place in 1999 was an agreement between the Institute of History and the Kerch Museum about something quite other than inventory numbers.

The agreement, valid for one year, permitted Gavrilov’s assistants (identified in the document as research staff of the Institute of History, which none of them was) to work with and photograph the monuments. The Institute of History undertook to give the Museum a copy of all photographs taken in the year 1999-2000, plus copies of the old photographs in the Institute Archive. But, as appears from Gavrilov’s account in the Album, p. 412 with n. 150, not one of these photographs was actually used (only a solitary squeeze), because of ‘lack of technique and miserable present state of many stones’ (BMCR 2006.02.15). It is unclear to us what is meant by ‘lack of technique’ (were the editors unable to obtain a decent camera, or incapable of learning the necessary photographic skills?), but the assertion about the bad state of many stones (cf. a bit later in BMCR, p. 1, ‘[the old] photographs more often show a better state of preservation of inscriptions’) immediately raises a question: What of the rest? ‘Many’ is not the same as ‘all’, or even ‘most’, nor is ‘more often’ the same as ‘always’. Now for the moment of truth.

Stones that are in no worse a state than before should yield better pictures to the more advanced techniques of photography available today. But a number of the stones are actually in a better state than they used to be. This is so with nearly all those in the Hermitage, and a goodly number in Kerch. Quite simply, the stones have been cleaned. Sometimes the most preliminary and amateurish cleaning, done by us during our time in the Hermitage, has been enough to correct a reading or make it more precise. For example, in CIRB 1262, line 21, read ‘ [Κ]ίμβρον, not the unknown Θίμβρον (which the CIRB editors say is ‘in accordance with the stone’). The trace of theta is an optical illusion. The published photograph, taken before the cleaning, is useless. The same is true in the case of CIRB 905: the crude retouching of the printed photograph favours the mistaken reading accepted in CIRB ( ΘΡΑΚΙΛΑΣ, ΘΡΑΚΙΛΟΥ), despite the fact that all subsequent investigators (V.P. Yajlenko, S.R. Tokhtas’ev, A.P. Bekhter) saw in both cases delta, not lambda.

All this was well understood by officials of the Kerch Museum, who, once they realised that Gavrilov’s project was to publish only old photographs, wrote the following letter to the members of the Academic Council of the St. Petersburg Institute of History, which was then due to discuss the quality of his forthcoming Album:

Dear Colleagues,

We have learned that your Institute, together with the Bibliotheca classica Petropolitana, is preparing to publish an Album of illustrations to the Corpus of Bosporan Inscriptions, which will include numerous photographic representations of epigraphic monuments kept in the lapidarium of the Kerch State Historico-Cultural Reserve. In this connection, we consider it essential to alert you to two circumstances affecting the preparation of this edition, which in our view involve important issues of principle.

1. A collection of photographs taken some 40-50 years ago records the condition of the monuments around the end of the 1950s and 1960s. In the meantime, the condition of a proportion of the stones kept in Kerch has changed substantially. Some for various reasons are in a significantly worse state of preservation; for them, the earlier photographs are documents of indisputable significance. Other stones, however, have on the contrary been restored and cleaned in recent years. In their case the old photographs may misrepresent how they actually look. And yet other stones have undergone both deterioration and cleaning. This non-uniform state of affairs requires anyone preparing to publish a photo album to check each stone against the old photographs, so as to reach an individual decision about whether the picture is suitable for publication, or whether it should be replaced by a new photograph. In a number of cases it will be sensible to print old and new photographs side by side. The publication of the old photographs alone, without checking them against the stones, can not only misrepresent the condition of the actual monuments, but may also discredit the Kerch Museum, where intensive work is under way restoring epigraphic monuments for publication in the Catalogue of the Collection of Antiquities in the Kerch Museum, the first volume of which ( Ancient Sculpture) came out in April 2004.

2. So far as we are aware, the group entrusted with preparing the CIRB -Album for publication does not include either S.R. Tokhtas’ev or A.P. Kulakova [married name Bekhter], who are the principal researchers to have occupied themselves (long and fruitfully) with the study of the Bosporan inscriptions and to have worked with the epigraphic collection in the Kerch Museum. The sole epigrapher known to us in your list of authors is N.A. Pavlichenko [whose specialty is ceramic stamps – I. L., S.T]. Earlier, we had invited her to contribute to the catalogue just mentioned of our sculpture collection. She was supposed to see through the publication of epigraphic monuments in collaboration with A.P. Kulakova of St. Petersburg University and S.R. Tokhtas’ev of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the overall editorship residing with S.R. Tokhtas’ev. Unfortunately, she did not complete her undertaking, which was eventually transferred to A.P. Kulakova. Thus the membership of the team preparing the CIRB -Album for publication evokes in us surprise and doubt about the professional level of the forthcoming edition.

N.A. Pavlichenko has probably kept copies of photographs of the present condition of monuments in the Kerch Museum, received by her for preparing one of the volumes of the Catalogue of the Collection of Antiquities in the Kerch Museum, and will be proposing to use them in your edition. We inform you in advance that these photographs were taken within the framework of a joint project between the Kerch Museum and the Demeter Fund and they can only be used by these two organizations.

We request you to take into account the points made herein when you decide the question of the expediency of publishing an Album to illustrate the CIRB before additional technical work on the epigraphic monuments has been completed within the framework of the relevant agreements.

The signatories of the letter were P.I. Ivanenko, Director of the Kerch State Historico-Cultural Reserve, and V.I. Zin’ko, Director of the Demeter Fund.

The State Historical Museum in Moscow, third in its holdings of Bosporan monuments, also sent a letter to the Director of the Institute of History to accompany its list of inventory numbers. Of particular note is the following extract:

We also warn you that, when the inscriptions were photographed for the CIRB in the Fifties of the twentieth century, the majority had not been cleaned of dirt and lime deposit, as a result of which the photographs do not always give an adequate representation of the original. In this connection the edition you are preparing is liable to serious mistakes in the reading of inscriptions. We consider that prior to publication it is essential to check the text against the original monuments, as well as to prepare new photographs after the inscriptions have undergone the essential restoration work and cleaning.

Not one of the CIRB -Album’s editors found it necessary after this letter was received to visit the lapidarium of the State Historical Museum.

Not only was no attention paid to the protests of museums against the publication of photographs which had not been checked against the original monuments. The museum protests were not even read out when the Academic Council of the St. Petersburg Institute of History met on 24 February 2004 to discuss publication of the CIRB -Album. When the members of the Council (the great majority of whom are specialists in Russian history, not one of them an epigrapher) voted in favour of publication, they did so on the basis of quite inadequate information. The official assessors of the Album, whose reports were read to the meeting, were (i) a specialist in the history of Coptic Christianity, and (ii) a specialist in the historiography of the Bosporan Kingdom, who has never worked in the field of ancient, let alone of Bosporan, epigraphy. As a result, the decision in favour of publication under the Russian Academy’s imprimatur was taken without the participation of any epigrapher and without knowledge of the position of two of the three museums where the most prominent collections are held.

Gavrilov and his co-authors are muddling notions when they claim (BMCR 2006.02.15), ‘[T]he total number of museums that agreed to collaborate is twenty’. These twenty museums sent the inventory numbers of their collections in response to official letters of request. To withhold the inventory numbers would have amounted to deviation from standard museum practice. Not withholding them is a long, long way from collaboration.

3. Ivantchik is concerned (BMCR 2005.11.20) about the way the phrase lapidem non vidimus appears from time to time in the CIRB commentary. This gives readers the impression that inscriptions which are not so annotated have been subject to editorial autopsy. But that is not so. Contrary to accepted epigraphic norms, most of the stones in most of the museums have not been seen by the editors. Gavrilov et al. cannot refute this allegation, for it is museum practice to register everyone who works with their collections. Instead, Gavrilov et al. now explain (BMCR 2006.02.15) that the technical phrase lapidem non vidimus was used by the editors in a non-standard sense (‘perhaps not an apt turn of phrase’), in an attempt to ‘hint cautiously that some stones seemed to be missing or at least disappeared from view’.

Never mind that for such cases the Album normally employs the phrase nunc ubi sit ignoratur (e.g. CIRB 68, 156, 235, 368, etc.). In lemmata on the Kerch inscriptions the phrase lapidem non vidimus occurs 312 times. If we follow Gavrilov’s new idiolect, this implies that around half the stones in the Kerch lapidarium are either lost or are missing from their proper place, inaccessible to researchers. Yet in the course of just one working season (the summer of 2004) A.P. Bekhter was able to examine de visu around a hundred of the allegedly missing 312. To mention just the important stones: CIRB 88, 170, 177, 189, 194, 218, 231, 280, 282, 300, 313, 348, 356, 360, 370, 371, 378, 389, 394, 406, 412, 414, 433, 454, 465, 470, 476, 487, 489, 546, 593, 616, 617, 619, 624, 626, 646, 652, 694, 875, 877, 878, 883, 884, 896, 905, 906, 945, 960, 963, 964, 969, 1027, 1075.

Nearly all small fragments of inscriptions in the keeping of the Kerch Museum (mostly official documents) — for example, CIRB 5, 109, 297, 822, 828, 901, 987 — are marked lapidem non vidimus, while for the majority of them no inventory number is given. In fact, these materials are easily accessible. They are kept in a special location, provisionally named ‘the safe room’, where they are arranged in boxes and separated from one another by sheets of paper. There is no barrier to making their acquaintance.

The greatest surprise is to find lapidem non vidimus annotating monuments which are on public exhibition in the Kerch museums. For example, gravestone CIRB 264 is exhibited in the Picture Gallery, while in the archaeological museum visitors can see the anthropomorphic gravestone CIRB 496 and the list of names from Nymphaeum CIRB 912. The Album’s annotation for all three is lapidem non vidimus.

Likewise the dedication to Apollo Iatros CIRB 974 now kept in the Kerch lapidarium (previously at the Tsar Burial Mound). When studied by A.P. Bekhter it was in good condition and fully satisfactory photographs were taken of it.

So much for the stones classified, according to Gavrilov’s recent explication of lapidem non vidimus, as ‘missing’ or ‘disappeared’. In attempting to cover up the unprofessional execution of their self-assumed undertaking, he and his young colleagues brazenly besmirch the good name of the Kerch Museum.

4. In their reply to Ivantchik, Gavrilov et al. complain about his charging them (BMCR 2006.02.15) with ‘an amazing number of mistakes in lemmata’ without, however, specifying what kind of mistakes he was talking about. In this section we address their curiosity.

But first, a remark about the advance excuse they formulate as follows:

… [M]aking a compromise between endless inquiry and responsibility for the collection created some forty years ago, the editors tried to make Russian lemmata of the CIRB (1965) available to everybody (without knowing Russian) who is interested in Bosporan epigraphy. There are still a number of emendations of lemmata published in CIRB, some new publications are cited and repositions announced, but only to such a degree as our initial goal permitted.

The problem, we suggest, is not limitations imposed by their proclaimed initial goal, to get some pictures and commentary out into the public domain for readers with Latin but no Russian. The problem is plain lack of familiarity with the scholarly literature on Bosporan epigraphy. On the occasion mentioned above when the Academic Council of the St. Petersburg Institute of History met to discuss publication of the CIRB -Album, one of the authors of this rebuttal (S.R. Tokhtas’ev) offered some corrections which were duly incorporated in the lemmata, sometimes with acknowledgement. But alas, in the three minutes he was allowed to speak he could only deal with a miserly number of the mistakes. Readers are now invited to judge, in the light of the examples we adduce below of what was not corrected, whether this was due to restrictions imposed by the editors’ initial goal or to plain ignorance and incompetence.

Inscriptions wrongly classified as lost:

CIRB 618. ‘… nunc ubi sint incertum’. This reproduces CIRB‘s mistake. In fact, the inscription is in the Kerch Museum, inv. no. KL-783 (at present 1st floor, deposit 23). The two fragments comprising the inscription were previously found on different floors (both accessible, however, and with readable text), but were united following their identification by A.P. Bekhter.

CIRB 681. ‘… nunc perisse videtur’. In fact, the inscription is found in the Kerch lapidarium, first floor, deposit 5, no inventory number. The editors here are emending the CIRB lemma, which was more cautious: ‘The location of the stele is now unknown’.

CIRB 901. ‘… lapidem frustra quaesivimus’. The inscription is to be found in the ‘safe room’ of the Kerch lapidarium, inv. no. KL-1185.

CIRB 1113. ‘In Museo Chorognosiae oppidi Krasnodar asservari a CIRB -editoribus indicatur; utrum etiamnunc ibi extet necne haud satis liquet’. The stone is kept, as before, in the Krasnodar Museum (under a tin roof in the middle of the courtyard), inv. no. KM 6281/5.

Origin of monuments

Mistaken indications of the origin of monuments are given for: CIRB 175 (Myrmekium, not Panticapaeum), 666 (Myrmekium, not Panticapaeum), 154 (not in Panticapaeum, but significantly West of the ancient settlement of Panticapaeum), 435 (from the necropolis on Cape Fanri, not from Panticapaeum), 825 (most probably a forgery), 837 (from Gorgippia, not from Panticapaeum), 1313 (from Tanais, not origin unknown). For a more detailed list, see our above-mentioned Russian review, 184 f.

Mistakes and inaccuracies in descriptions of stones

Mistakes and inaccuracies abound, of various types. For instance, the absence of any indication that a stone was inscribed on top of an erased earlier inscription, or that there is a relief on the reverse side of the stone, or that the original inscription has been disfigured by later recarving. Examples may be found in the lemmata to CIRB 6, 9, 10, 23, 25, 28, 40, 52, 54, 59, 60, 78, 113, 135, 287, 301, 374, 486, 487, 582, 619, 704, 738, 823, 840, 848, 933, 936, 940, 974, 983, 987, 989, 1000, 1020, 1036, 1037, 1941, 1120, 1123, 1246.

Errors about datings and their authorship

Such mistakes are found, for example, in CIRB 6a (the dating is due to V.V. Shkorpil, not to the editors of CIRB); 9 ( CIRB proposed that the inscription belongs to the time when the kingdom was divided between Spartocus II and Paerisades I; the new Album editors do not understand the problem and date the inscription to the reign of Spartocus II OR Paerisades I, being unaware of the article of N.S. Belova, which proved that in fact the inscription belongs to the reign of Paerisades I); 24 (the dating belongs to V.V. Latyschev, not to the editors of CIRB); 26, 29, 56, 67, 74, 75, 147, 822, 1042, 1122, 1144 (the list is by no means complete).

5. Gavrilov et al. assert (BMCR 2006.02.15) that after the mid-1990’s the St. Petersburg Institute of History was not made aware of the project, involving ourselves, Ivantchik and others, for producing a complete new edition of the Bosporan inscriptions.

Untrue. Gavrilov himself, a member of the Institute and Head of its Department of Classical Antiquity knew perfectly well what was proposed. He was personally involved in the decision not to publish the old Album of illustrations to the old, out-dated CIRB, but to prepare a new and better edition with more adequate illustrations (see above). The decision not to go ahead as originally planned was taken at a time when both he and Levinskaya still belonged to the same Department in the Institute of History. He raised no objection. They were in it together. Moreover, Ivantchik (BMCR 2005.11.20) has already told of his inviting Gavrilov to join his team and the latter declining on the grounds that epigraphy was not his field — this at the very time when Gavrilov and his team were at work on their recently published Album. And quite apart from Ivantchik’s invitation, Gavrilov would regularly chat with Tokhtas’ev in the Bibliotheca Classica Petropolitana and receive updated reports on our project, which was also mentioned in several articles that Tokhtas’ev published in Hyperboreus, a journal for which Gavrilov has long served as a member of the editorial board. He certainly knew what we were doing. About his own project, however, he never breathed a word, and his young collaborators were sworn to keep it a secret from us.

We may add that the preparation of a new edition of CIRB is no dream for the future, as Gavrilov now implies. It is part of a collective undertaking to republish, under the title Inscriptiones antiquae orae septentrionalis Ponti Euxini graecae et latinae, not just the Bosporan inscriptions, but all the inscriptions which survive from the Northern Black Sea Shore. This project has been continuously under way since 1995 (since 2003 under the auspices of the International Union of Academies) with contributors drawn from a number of academic institutions. So far as concerns the two authors of this article, the photo archive we first put together for the original publication project, and continued to make use of during the initial stages of the replacement project, was handed in to the St. Petersburg Institute of History in 1999, together with our report on the work we had done with it. Completion was acknowledged. The materials went into the Institute archives, all of them new deposits gathered by our efforts, there to bide their time.

But not, alas, for long. Gavrilov and the team of young collaborators he had assembled decided to make use of the results of our work in secret. Their assertion (BMCR 2006.02.15) that Ivantchik and ourselves planned to publish the Institute’s photo archive without its permission is absurd. Without the Institute’s permission to publish, the collection would never have travelled to Germany, and we have already explained that it became obvious in the middle of the 1990’s that the project had to start again from scratch. Gavrilov, as already noted, was party to this decision and understood the scholarly reasons for it. Nonetheless he set about using our old work, and organized a group of young scholars to spend several years secretly working to prepare both a picture book and an electronic database which he knew full well would not live up to the professional scholarly standards implied by the learned title Corpus Inscriptionum Regni Bosporani: Album Imaginum. His misuse of their time is even less forgivable than his misappropriation of our work.

[For a response to this response by Alexander Gavrilov, Natalia Pavlichenko, and Denis Keyer, please see BMCR 2007.04.30.]

Notes

1. This response has been translated from the Russian by M.F. Burnyeat, with the approval of the authors.