Topic: government (1)

• ConceptThe King of Kings

  The Achaemenid king's supreme title (xšāyaθiya xšāyaθiyānām, "king of kings") and the whole ideology of rule it carried: a single righteous king set by the favour of Ahura Mazdā over all the peoples of the earth, guardian of the good creation and its order against the Lie. This entry gathers what the kings said of their own office in the inscriptions they carved, the virtues they claimed on their tombs, the distance and splendour of the court, and sets that royal self-portrait against the very different "oriental despot" the Greeks drew, foregrounding the modern scholarship (above all Amélie Kuhrt) that insists the ideology is not the reality, and that the king, for all his majesty, was never held to be a god.