In the reign of King Tiberius Julius Rhescuporides, the pious friend of the Caesars and the Romans, in the year 377,[3] on the twelfth day of the month of Peritios, I, Chresta, formerly the wife of Drusus, declare in the house of prayer (προσευχή) that my foster-son Heracles is free once [for all], in accordance with my vow, so that he may not be captured or annoyed by my heirs, and may move about wherever he chooses, without let or hindrance, except for [the obligation of visiting] the house of prayer for worship and constant attendance. [Done] with the approval of my heirs Iphicleides and Heliconias, and with the participation of the Synagogue of the Jews in the guardianship (συνεπιτροπευούσης δὲ καὶ τῆς συναγωγῆς τῶν Ἰουδαίων). This inscription, paralleled by a similar document of the same period, was evidently meant to certify the act of liberating a slave, which, according to custom, was performed publicly, in the "house of prayer," with the participation of the representatives of the Jewish community.[4] The contents of the inscriptions enable us to draw the following conclusions bearing on the history of the Jews during that period: 1. The Jewish community in Taurian Bosporus was made up of Hellenized Jews, who employed the Greek language in their religious and civil documents, and called themselves by Greek names (Chresta, Drusus, Heracles, Artemisia, etc.). 2. While assimilated to the Greeks in point of language, they were firmly united among themselves by the bond of religion, as is shown by the obligation, imposed even on the freedman, the _libertinus_, to visit the house of prayer for worship. 3. The Jewish community enjoyed a certain amount of civil autonomy, as shown in the case cited above, in which the community appears in the rôle of a juridical person, acting as the guardian of the liberated slaves. It is to be assumed that similar communities of Hellenized Jews were found in the other Greek colonies of Tauris, their population being constantly swelled by the influx of immigrants from Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt, particularly from Judeo-Hellenistic Alexandria. Since these communities of the first Christian century appear to have been well-organized and to have possessed their own institutions, we are safe in assuming that they were preceded by a more primitive phase of communal Jewish life, in the shape of petty settlements and trading stations, which must have arisen in earlier centuries.