Great king

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For the 1942 German film, see The Great King.
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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

The title is most usually associated with the

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

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

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

Grosswojwod
.

Examples

See also

References

  1. ISBN 0801861993
    .
  2. ISBN 0801842514
    .
  3. ISBN 9788637900122
    . Велики краљ
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