Great king
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Great king,and the equivalent in many languages, refers to historical titles of certainmonarchs,suggesting an elevated status among the host of kings andprinces.
History
[edit]The title is most usually associated with theshahanshah(shah of shahs, i.e. king of kings, indeed translated from Greek asbasileustōn basileōn,later adopted by the Byzantine emperors) ofPersiaunder theAchaemenid dynastywhose vast empire in Asia lasted for 200 years up to the year 330 BC, which was later adopted by successors of theAchaemenid Empirewhose 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 ofEgypt,Yamhad,Hatti,Babylonia,Mitanni(until its demise in the 14th century),Assyria(only after the demise of Mitanni), and for a brief time theMyceneans.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 inAmarnaandHittitearchives, provide details of this diplomacy.[2]
The case ofmaharaja( "greatraja",great king and prince, inSanskritandHindi) on the Indian subcontinent, originally reserved for the regional hegemon such as theGupta,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 titlekhanalso came to be "augmented" to tiles likekhagan,chaganorhakan,meaning "khan of khans", i.e. equivalent to king of kings.
The aforementioned Indian stylemaharajadhirajais also an example of an alternative semantic title for similar "higher" royal styles such asKing 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 ofemperorstrace back to the Romanimperator(strictly speaking a republican military honorific), or the family surnameCaesar(turned into an imperial title sinceDiocletian'stetrarchy).
As the conventional use ofkingand its equivalents to render various other monarchical styles illustrates, there are many roughly equivalent styles, each of which may spawn a "greatX"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 includegrand dukeand GermanGrosswojwod.
Examples
[edit] |
- Antiochus III the Great,Hellenistic Greek king and the sixth ruler of theSeleucid Empire,bore the titleBasileus Megas
- In medieval Serbia,Stefan the First-Crowned,likelyStefan Uroš I,Stefan DečanskiandStefan Dušanhad the title of "great king" (Велики краљ,Veliki kralj)[3]
See also
[edit]References
[edit]- ^Cohen, Raymond; Westbrook, Raymond, eds. (1999).Amarna Diplomacy.Johns Hopkins.ISBN0801861993.
- ^SeeTrevor, Bryce (1992).Letters of the Great Kings of the Ancient Near East.Routledge.ISBN041525857X.;forAmarna lettersseeWilliam L., Moran (1992).The Amarna Letters.Johns Hopkins.ISBN0801842514.
- ^Svetislav Mandić (1986).Velika gospoda sve srpske zemlje i drugi prosopografski prilozi.Srpska književna zadruga. p. 60.ISBN9788637900122.
Велики краљ