Semantic title used by certain historical monarchs
Great king
, and the equivalent in many languages, refers to historical titles of certain
monarchs
, suggesting an elevated status among the host of kings and
princes
.
History
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The title is most usually associated with the
shahanshah
(shah of shahs, i.e. king of kings, indeed translated from Greek as
basileus
t?n basile?n
, later adopted by the Byzantine emperors) of
Persia
under the
Achaemenid dynasty
whose vast empire in Asia lasted for 200 years up to the year 330 BC, which was later adopted by successors of the
Achaemenid Empire
whose monarchial names were also succeeded by "the great". In comparison, "
high king
" was used by ancient rulers in Great Britain and Ireland, as well as Greece.
In the 2nd millennium BC Near East, there was a tradition of reciprocally using such addresses between powers, as a way of diplomatically recognizing each other as an equal. Only the kings of countries who were not subject to any other king and powerful enough to draw the respect from their adversaries were allowed to use the title of "great king". Those were the kings of
Egypt
,
Yamhad
,
Hatti
,
Babylonia
,
Mitanni
(until its demise in the 14th century),
Assyria
(only after the demise of Mitanni), and for a brief time the
Myceneans
. Great kings referred to each other as brothers and often established close relationships by means of marriages and frequent gift exchanges.
[1]
Letters exchanged between these rulers, several of which have been recovered especially in
Amarna
and
Hittite
archives, provide details of this diplomacy.
[2]
The case of
maharaja
("great
raja
", great king and prince, in
Sanskrit
and
Hindi
) on the Indian subcontinent, originally reserved for the regional hegemon such as the
Gupta
, is an example of how such a lofty style can get caught in a cycle of devaluation by "title inflation" as ever more, mostly less powerful rulers adopt the style. This is often followed by the emergence of one or more new, more exclusive and prestigious styles, as, in this case,
maharajadhiraja
(king of great kings"). The Turkic-Mongol title
khan
also came to be "augmented" to tiles like
khagan
,
chagan
or
hakan
, meaning "khan of khans", i.e. equivalent to king of kings.
The aforementioned Indian style
maharajadhiraja
is also an example of an alternative semantic title for similar "higher" royal styles such as
King of Kings
. Alternatively, a more idiomatic style may develop into an equally prestigious tradition of titles, because of the shining example of the original – thus, various styles of
emperors
trace back to the Roman
imperator
(strictly speaking a republican military honorific), or the family surname
Caesar
(turned into an imperial title since
Diocletian
's
tetrarchy
).
As the conventional use of
king
and its equivalents to render various other monarchical styles illustrates, there are many roughly equivalent styles, each of which may spawn a "great
X
" variant, either unique or becoming a rank in a corresponding tradition; in this context, "grand" is equivalent to "great" and sometimes interchangeable if convention does not firmly prescribe one of the two. Examples include
grand duke
and German
Grosswojwod
.
Examples
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See also
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References
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