Shah

This article is about the title given to the emperors/kings and lords of Iran. For other uses, see Shah (disambiguation).
This article is about Title of Ruling dynasty of Nepal. For other uses, see Shah (disambiguation).
"Shahanshah" redirects here. For the village in Iran, see Shahanshah, Lorestan.
"Hunkar" redirects here. For the epic poem by Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, see Hunkar (epic poem). For the restaurant in Istanbul, see Hünkar (restaurant).
Not to be confused with Shahenshah.
Royal and noble ranks in Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan

Shah : Emperor

High King

King : Sultan

Royal Prince : Shahzada, Mirza
Noble Prince : Sahibzada
Nobleman: Nawab, Baig

Shah (Šâh) (/ˈʃɑː/; Persian: شاه‎, [ʃɒːh], "king") is a title given to the emperors/kings and lords of Iran a.k.a. Persia, Nepal Afghanistan, Pakistan. In Iran (Persia and Greater Persia) the title was continuously used; rather than King in the European sense, each Persian ruler regarded himself as the Šâhanšâh (King of Kings) or Emperor of the Persian Empire. Mughal rulers of the Indian subcontinent also used the title of Shah. The word descends from Old Persian Xšâyathiya "king", which (for reasons of historical phonology) must be a borrowing from Median,[1] and is derived from the same root as Avestan xšaΘra-, "power" and "command", corresponding to Sanskrit (Old Indic) kṣatra- (same meaning), from which kṣatriya-, "warrior", is derived. The full, Old Persian title of the Achaemenid rulers of the First Persian Empire was Xšâyathiya Xšâyathiyânâm or Šâhe Šâhân, "King of Kings"[2] or "Emperor". Bearers of the Indian surname Shah, which has the same meaning, often originated from Afghanistan or Pakistan, or can claim an ancestor of Parthian or Sassanid dynasty descent. Shah dynasty is the title of the largest ruling dynasty from Nepal.

History

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran from 1941 to 1979

Šâh, or Shāhanshāh (King of Kings) to use the full-length term, was the title of the Persian emperors. It includes rulers of the first Persian Empire, the Achaemenid dynasty, who unified Persia and created a vast intercontinental empire, as well as rulers of succeeding dynasties throughout history until the twentieth century and the Imperial House of Pahlavi. The title was also extensively used by emperors of the Indian subcontinent, including those of the Mughal Empire. For instance, the third Mughal emperor, Akbar the Great (1542–1605), was formally known as "Shahanshah Akbar-e-Azam".

The full title of the Achaemenid rulers was XšāyaΘiya XšāyaΘiyānām, literally "King of Kings" in Old Persian, corresponding to Middle Persian Šāhān Šāh, and Modern Persian شاهنشاه (Shāhanshāh).[3][4] In Greek, this phrase was translated as βασιλεύς τῶν βασιλέων (basileus tōn basiléōn), "King of Kings", equivalent to "Emperor". Both terms were often shortened to their roots shah and basileus, which later resulted in confusion over the nature of the title due to the adoption of basileus by the Byzantine emperors as an explicitly imperial title equivalent to the various titles of their Roman predecessors; the resultant semantic drift caused basileus tōn basiléōn to now mean "Emperor of Emperors", a fantastical title never used in Persian history, or indeed anywhere else.

In Western languages, Shah is often used as an imprecise rendering of Shāhanshāh. The term was first recorded in English in 1564 as a title for the King of Persia and with the spelling "Shaw". For a long time, Europeans thought of Shah as a particular royal title rather than an imperial one, although the monarchs of Persia regarded themselves as emperors of the Persian Empire (later the Empire of Iran). The European opinion changed in the Napoleonic era, when Persia was an ally of the Western powers eager to make the Ottoman Sultan release his hold on various (mainly Christian) European parts of the Ottoman Empire, and western (Christian) emperors had obtained the Ottoman acknowledgement that their western imperial styles were to be rendered in Turkish as padishah.

In the twentieth century, the Shah of Persia, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, officially adopted the title شاهنشاه Shâhanshâh and, in western languages, the rendering Emperor. He also styled his wife شهبانو Shahbânu (Empress). Iran no longer had a shah after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Ruler styles

Shahzadeh

Shahzadeh (Persian شاهزاده Šāhzādeh). In the realm of a shah (or a more lofty derived ruler style), a prince or princess of the blood was logically called shahzada as the term is derived from shah using the Persian patronymic suffix -zādeh or -zāda, "born from" or "descendant of". However the precise full styles can differ in the court traditions of each shah's kingdom. In the Indian sub-continent, female descendants or princesses are called Shahzadi but in the original Persian, it is a gender neutral word.

Thus, in Oudh, only sons of the sovereign shah bahadur (see above) were by birth-right styled "Shahzada [personal title] Mirza [personal name] Bahadur", though this style could also be extended to individual grandsons and even further relatives. Other male descendants of the sovereign in the male line were merely styled "Mirza [personal name]" or "[personal name] Mirza". This could even apply to non-Muslim dynasties. For example, the younger sons of the ruling Sikh maharaja of Punjab were styled "Shahzada [personal name] Singh Bahadur".

The corruption shahajada, "Shah's son", taken from the Mughal title Shahzada, is the usual princely title borne by the grandsons and male descendants of a Nepalese sovereign, in the male line of the Shah dynasty.

For the heir to a "Persian-style" shah's royal throne, more specific titles were used, containing the key element Vali Ahad, usually in addition to shahzada, where his junior siblings enjoyed this style.[5]

Other styles

Related terms

References

  1. ↑ An introduction to Old Persian (p. 149). Prods Oktor Skjærvø. Harvard University. 2003.
  2. ↑ Old Persian. Appendices, Glossaries, Indices & Transcriptions. Prods Oktor Skjærvø. Harvard University. 2003.
  3. ↑ D. N. MacKenzie. A Concise Pahlavi Dictionary. Routledge Curzon, 2005. ISBN 0-19-713559-5
  4. ↑ M. Mo’in. An Intermediate Persian Dictionary. Six Volumes. Amir Kabir Publications, Teheran, 1992.
  5. ↑ Shahzada son of shah, Newsvine.com
  6. ↑ David D. Laitin, Said S. Samatar, Somalia: Nation in Search of a State, (Westview Press: 1987), p. 12.

External links

Look up shah in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.