Great king
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Great King and the equivalent in many languages is a semantic title for historical titles of Monarchs, suggesting an elevated status among the host of Kings and Princes. This title is most usually associated with the kings of Persia under the Achaemenid dynasty whose vast empire in Asia lasted for 300 years up to the year 330 BC, and later adopted by successors of the Achaemenid empire whose monarchial names were also succeeded by "the Great".
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", great King and 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 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), the family surname Caesar (turned into an imperial title since Diocletian's Tetrarchy), and Khan which comes from Genghis Khan.
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".
See also
