Tmutarakan Stone

a marble slab bearing a carved inscription in Russian, dated 1068, found on the Taman’ Peninsula in 1792. The inscription states that in the year 6576 of the sixth in-diction (that is, AD. 1068), Prince Gleb “measured the sea across the ice” from Tmutarakan’ to Korchev and found the distance to be 14,000 sazheni (1 sazhen’ = 2.134 m). The text of the inscription was first published by A. I. Musin-Pushkin in 1794—an event that, together with subsequent research by A. N. Olenin, marked the beginning of Russian epigraphy and paleography. Because of the inscription’s uniqueness, doubts arose as to its authenticity. The most impressive evidence of the stone’s authenticity was provided when archaeologists discovered the historical remains of Tmutarakan’ at the site where the stone was found.