Great King
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- This article is on royal styles in history; for "Great King" in fiction See Great King (Myst)
Great King and the equivalent in many languages is a semantic model for historical titles of Monarchs, suggesting an elevated status among the host of Kings and minor Princes. This title is most usually associated with the kings of Persia under the Achaemenid dynasty whose vast empire lasted for 300 years up to the year 330 BC.
In pre-classical Antiquity, there was a tradition of reciprocally using such addresses between powers as a way of diplomatically recognizing each-other as major, such as the Hittites, Mitanni and the Pharaoh of Egypt.
The case of Maharaja ("Great Raja", i.e. great King/Prince, in Sanskrit and Hindi) on the Indian subcontinent, originally reserved for the regional hegemon such as the Gupta, is a striking example how such a lofty style of this or an alternative model can get caught in a cycle of devalution 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 ("Great King of Kings")
The aforementioned Indian style Maharajadhiraja is also an example of an alternative semantic model 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 command) and 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:
In fact, there are even cases of such a natural style being conventionally uses to render an original style that does not conform to the semantic model, as in "Great Sultan".
