The title is most usually associated with the
shahanshah (shah of shahs, i.e., king of kings, indeed translated to the Greek as
basileus tōn basileōn, 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, Ireland, and Greece. In the 2nd millennium BC Near East, there was a tradition of reciprocally using such addresses between powers to recognize each other as equal diplomatically. Only the kings of countries who were not subject to any other king and were powerful enough to draw the respect of 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 through marriages and frequent gift exchanges. Letters exchanged between these rulers, several of which have been recovered, especially in
Amarna and
Hittite archives, provide details of this diplomacy. The case of the
maharaja ("great
raja," the great king and prince, in
Sanskrit and
Hindi) on the Indian subcontinent, initially 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 the 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 the
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 the convention does not firmly prescribe one of the two. Examples include the
Grand Duke and German
Grosswojwod. ==Examples==