The King of Kings

The royal name and titles run, in the fullest form, something like Dārayavauš xšāyaθiya vazraka, xšāyaθiya xšāyaθiyānām, xšāyaθiya dahyūnām: "Darius the great king, king of kings, king of countries." Three claims are stacked. Xšāyaθiya vazraka, "great king," lifts the ruler above ordinary kings. Xšāyaθiya xšāyaθiyānām, "king of kings," is a genitive of rank: he is king over those who are themselves kings, the paramount overlord of subordinate monarchs. Xšāyaθiya dahyūnām, "king of the lands" or "of the countries," binds the office to the whole extent of the empire.

The grammar of the title may itself carry a foreign imprint. The genitive stands after its noun, king-of-kings rather than the order an Iranian language would lead one to expect. Some read this as a Mesopotamian influence, the genitive following its noun in the manner of Assyrian inscriptions; others, noting the peculiar phonetics of the words, ask instead whether an Elamite model lies behind the formula. Whether the title was borrowed or merely built on a shared pattern is unsettled.^[1] The load-bearing word is xšaça (Old Persian for "kingdom, rule, dominion"), and it recurs one level down: the provincial governor is the xšaçapāvan, the "protector of the realm," the satrap. From the throne to the province the empire was a single structure of kingship and its keepers.

The formula was carried across the empire's languages. In Xerxes' Gate of All Nations at Persepolis the king announces himself:

I am Xerxes, the great king, king of kings, king of the lands of many tongues, son of Darius the king, an Achaemenid, a Persian, son of a Persian, an Aryan of Aryan seed.

Xerxes, XPa, the Gate of All Nations^[2]

The Old Persian was set beside Elamite and Babylonian on the monuments, and in the west the Greeks made their own version. The Elamite scribes rendered "king of kings" with a native possessive construction; the Greeks turned xšāyaθiya vazraka into ho megas basileus, "the Great King."

"King of the countries" was no idle flourish. The inscriptions unfold the title into rolls of the dahyāva, the "lands" or "peoples" the king held, named one after another out from Persia, and they reckon the whole as obedience and tribute owed to one man. Darius closes the roster at Behistun with the plain accounting of empire: "These are the countries which obeyed me; by the grace of Ahuramazda they were my subjects; they bore tribute to me."^[3]

The lists were given a picture as well as a text. On the tomb façade of Darius at Naqsh-e Rostam, and again at Persepolis, the throne-platform on which the king stands is carried on the upraised arms of a file of some thirty small figures, each in his own dress and each labelled with the name of his people: the nations of the empire literally bear the king up, and a caption has him name them in order, from Persia and Media out to the Ionians, the Scythians, the Indians and the men of Kush. The realm is shown as a willing multitude of peoples, distinct and content, lifting a single righteous king, so that the empire's diversity throws glory upward onto the throne rather than reproaching it.

The rolls are not a fixed administrative map. They differ from inscription to inscription and reign to reign, some longer, some shorter, the order and the membership shifting, and they do not tally with the tribute-districts Herodotus reports or the provinces the tablets imply. Most scholars, following Margaret Root's study of the royal art and Pierre Briant's synthesis, read the lists as ideological rather than bureaucratic: not a ledger of what the king taxed but a portrait of the reach he claimed, the known world drawn under one crown.^[4][5] Bruno Jacobs and others read them instead as reflecting the empire's real administrative divisions (see the Peoples of the Empire).

The claim behind the lists is universal, and it too was inherited. The Persian king was told by his own ideology that the whole earth owed him tribute, a claim to world dominion that the Assyrians and older Mesopotamian rulers had made before him, recognising no rightful independence outside the imperial order.^[6] The same reasoning cut two ways. It made the lands already held the king's by divine grant, and it made any land not yet held a disorder awaiting correction, so that a war beyond the frontier could be presented not as conquest but as the king claiming his own.

The idea of a king set over kings was old before the Persians took it up, and they recombined it from more than one source. The Akkadian title šar šarrāni, "king of kings," is well attested among the Old Assyrian kings, though not among the neo-Babylonian rulers whom Cyrus displaced;^[7] the boast of holding "the four quarters" and "the lands" is the old language of the monarchs of the Tigris and Euphrates. The route by which the title reached the Persians is disputed. Frye held it "probably Median in origin, though the Urartians and others used the title long before the Medes", and observed that in the seventh century the style seems, on the written record, to have been in vogue only in Urartu, from whom the Medes, their southern neighbours, likely took it.^[7] When Cyrus took Babylon in 539 he had himself proclaimed in exactly that inherited idiom:

I am Cyrus, king of the world, great king, mighty king, king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters.

The Cyrus Cylinder, ll. 20–21, trans. Cogan^[8]

On the dated Babylonian tablets Cyrus appears from 539 as "king of Babylon" and "king of the countries," and in one instance as "king of the countries, king of the kings," šar šarrāni, taking the Mesopotamian formula up whole.^[9]

Nearer and more concrete was the Elamite root. The Persian kingdom's own memory reached back, by the reckoning of the Cyrus Cylinder, to "Teispes, great king, king of Anshan," Anshan an old Elamite royal seat; and scholarship has made steadily clearer how much of Persian iconography, dress, cult, administration and even the writing of the tablets was Elamite in origin. The King of Kings was a deliberate composite: an Iranian ruler clothing an ancient Near Eastern majesty in new, Persian dress.

What was new with Darius was the putting of it into words. The royal voice, as Amélie Kuhrt observes, "only becomes audible with the accession of Darius I," for whom a new script, Old Persian, was devised so that the king's own language could stand beside Babylonian and Elamite cuneiform; it is with Darius that "what became the standard royal ideology was defined."^[10]

The governing claim of that ideology is that kingship is not seized but given. The standard inscription opens by naming Ahura Mazdā as creator and folds the making of the king into the making of the world:

A great god is Ahuramazda, who created this earth, who created yonder sky, who created man, who created happiness for man, who made Darius king, one king of many, one lord of many.

Darius I, DNa^[11][12]

The same divine will that made earth, heaven, man and happiness (Old Persian šiyāti, well-being, serene prosperity in this life) also made the king; king and god, in Kuhrt's phrase, "complement each other in the universe working for the same ends."^[10] The king never claims to have won his realm by his own arm. It is bestowed on him, and the formula that everywhere carries the point is vašnā Auramazdāha, "by the favour of Ahuramazda": Darius is king, and wins his battles, by the god's grace. To render the king his due, obedience to his word (dāta, law) and the payment of tribute (bāji), is therefore to take one's place in a divinely ordered scheme; and the king raised over the world's disorder is the remedy the god appoints:

When Ahuramazda saw this earth in commotion, thereafter he bestowed it upon me; he made me king. I am king.

Darius I, DNa^[11]

One consequence must be marked, because the Greek image runs the other way: this closeness to the god did not make the king a god. "The king's closeness to his god does not mean that he was regarded as divine," Kuhrt writes; "his office gave him a privileged relationship to the gods," and no more.^[10] No cult of the living king existed among the Achaemenids. That sets the King of Kings sharply apart from the divine pharaoh whose throne Cambyses and Darius also took, and from the deified Hellenistic monarchs who came after.

The king's task, in his own telling, is to hold the good creation in its right order against the force that unmakes it, the drauga, the Lie. Every rival who contested Darius's seizure of the throne is, at Behistun, a follower of the Lie; revolt is not mere treason but a cosmic offence, disorder loosed on the world:

As to these provinces which revolted, the Lie made them revolt, so that they deceived the people.

Darius I, DB §54^[3]

So rebellion can be cast as an offence against Ahura Mazdā himself, and the king's own legitimacy made to rest on his standing on the right side of that line:

Ahuramazda brought me help, because I was not wicked, nor was I a liar, nor was I a despot; I have ruled according to righteousness.

Darius I, DB §63^[3]

The disorder the king guards against has a fixed shape. Three evils recur as a set in the royal prayers, the enemy army, the failure of the harvest and the Lie, and the king asks the god to keep the land from all three together, as though military defeat, famine and falsehood were one calamity wearing three faces. Kingship is the standing watch against that calamity, and the mark of a good reign is that the three are held off.

A precise and much-cited point of the record cuts against a natural assumption. The vocabulary of the Lie saturates the Old Persian royal texts, drauga the Lie, draujana the liar, the verb durujiya "to lie," all frequent; but its positive counterpart, *arta* (the exact cognate of Vedic ṛta and Avestan aša), the truth and right order a reader of the Avesta would expect at the centre of the king's self-description, is all but absent from the royal texts. The word surfaces only once, bound to the god in worship, in Xerxes' daiva-inscription, where the king reveres "Ahuramazda and arta."^[2] As the king's own virtue, the counterpart set against the Lie, truth "does not appear in the Achaemenid inscriptions," in Kuhrt's phrase.^[10] The King of Kings is thus, in his own words, less the herald of right order than the enemy of the Lie: the order he guards is defined by what threatens it.

The fullest statement of what a King of Kings ought to be is carved on Darius's tomb at Naqsh-e Rostam, in the passage scholars label DNb, and, word for word, on a tablet in the name of his son Xerxes (XPl). The identity of the two texts is itself the lesson. As Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg argued, the wording is not one man's boast but "a statement of what it means to be a Persian king," the duties the office lays on whoever holds it.^[13] The king is a just judge, unmoved by hearsay:

What a man says against a man, that does not convince me, until I hear the testimony of both.

Darius I, DNb^[14]

He rewards and punishes strictly by desert, and he masters himself before he presumes to master others:

I am not hot-tempered. What things develop in my anger, I hold firmly under control by my thinking power.

Darius I, DNb^[14]

To this moral equipment the text adds the physical, for the king must be fit to fight the wars that hold the empire together:

As a horseman I am a good horseman; as a bowman I am a good bowman, both afoot and on horseback; as a spearman I am a good spearman, both afoot and on horseback.

Darius I, DNb^[14]

Discernment, self-command, firmness against wrongdoing, generosity to loyal service, and the trained body of a warrior: these are the qualities the office demands, and the reliefs echo them in stone.

The virtues had a matching image, and it was composed as carefully as the words. Root's study finds in it "a consistently idealized vision of kingship and empire," one that stressed piety, control and harmonious order and said nothing of the brutal wars, the heavy taxes and the fear of palace revolt that were the reigns' actual substance.^[4] The king on the reliefs is not a portrait but a type: the same enthroned, robed, bearded figure returns from reign to reign, told apart by its inscription rather than by any individual face.

Two images carry most of the weight. One is the audience: on the relief found in the Persepolis Treasury the king sits enthroned beneath a canopy in the long pleated court robe, a tall fluted tiara on his head, a staff rising in one hand and a lotus lifted in the other, an attendant behind him with fan and fly-whisk, a spear-bearing guard and an usher presenting the visitor.^[4] The other is the hero: in the doorways of the Persepolis palaces the king, dagger drawn, grips a rearing lion or a horned lion-monster and drives the blade home. Root reads the motif as apotropaic, set at the thresholds to turn away evil,^[4] the king as the guard who holds chaos at the door. The archer of the coinage, the horseman of the tomb text, the just judge, the master of his anger, the hero over the beast: one idealised figure, order overcoming disorder, repeated across the empire in stone and on metal.

The majesty was worn as well as carved. The court robe, purple and worked with gold, was so much the king's own that to be given one was a signal honour and to presume to it unbidden was death; the tiara, the staff and the very colour of the king's dress were regulated marks of an office no subject could approach in kind.

Around that seated figure turned a vast household in constant motion. It did not sit in one place: king and court migrated with the seasons, and the Greek reports gathered by Muhammad Dandamayev put autumn and winter at Babylon, spring at Susa, summer at Ecbatana, the great festivals at Persepolis, the crowning at Pasargadae. At the centre "lived in seclusion" the "sacred figure of the king," and access to him was itself a currency of power.^[15] Beside his mother and his principal wife, only the men of the six noblest Persian houses, the descendants of the Seven who had raised Darius to the throne (see the accession of Darius), held the right of unannounced approach; for everyone else the gate was kept by the hazārapatiš, the "commander of a thousand" (Greek chiliarch), captain of the royal bodyguard, through whom a petition to the presence had to pass. No one approached the King of Kings at all without first performing proskynesis, the act of obeisance the Greeks found so foreign and long misread as the worship of a god-king (see Proskynesis).

The machinery around the throne was vast: royal judges appointed for life to advise on law and custom; the "eyes and ears of the king," agents who reported sedition over the heads of the satraps; benefactors (orosangai) whose services were entered on a roll and repaid with robes, gold, horses and whole villages; scribes working in Elamite, Aramaic and Akkadian; and thousands fed daily at the king's table. Distance was the point. The King of Kings ruled less by being seen than by being, mostly, unseen, and it was that hidden magnificence the Greeks themselves seized on when they reached for an image of how a god might govern all things without being beheld:

All the Empire of Asia, bounded on the west by the Hellespont and on the east by the Indus, was apportioned according to races among generals and satraps and subject-princes of the Great King; and there were couriers and watchmen and messengers and superintendents of signal-fires.

Pseudo-Aristotle, De Mundo 398a, trans. Forster^[16]

Kingship could be signalled in the king's very name. From Darius on, Rüdiger Schmitt has argued, the taking of a name became an instrument of the office: a man raised to the throne might lay aside the name he was born with for a regnal one, and the practice, whatever its exact origin, worked to lift the standing of kingship in his subjects' eyes.^[7] The clearly documented cases begin a century later, with Darius II, born Ochus, and the Artaxerxids after him, who ruled under throne-names not their own (see the Achaemenid dynasty). Like the titulary and the regalia, the royal name was part of the equipment of rule rather than a private fact about the man.

For all its cosmic framing, Achaemenid kingship had no safe rule of succession, and legitimacy was something to be asserted. Darius, who was, as Briant puts it, "certainly not in the direct line of succession,"^[5] had the most to assert, and Behistun is in good part an apologia: an elaborate defence of an irregular seizure, dressed as the restoration of an order broken by an impostor and a swarm of liars. He anchors his right in blood, reciting a royal line eight kings deep:

My father was Hystaspes; the father of Hystaspes was Arsames; the father of Arsames was Ariaramnes. Eight of my line were kings before me; I am the ninth. In two lines have we been kings.

Darius I, DB §§3–4^[3]

Descent from Achaemenes, made the founder of the line only with Darius, became the credential no claimant could do without, and whether the genealogy that binds Cyrus's house to Darius's is fact or Darius's own construction is the central question of the dynasty's history. Whichever it was, the version was broadcast to be believed: copies of the Behistun text were sent out as far as Babylon and, in Aramaic, to the Jewish garrison at Elephantine in Egypt, and a form of it was set on the tomb. Once seized, kingship then passed within the house, though never quietly; the throne ideally went to a son "born in the purple," after his father's accession, the argument that carried Xerxes over an elder half-brother, and a contested succession remained a danger the ideology of the one god-given king could paper over but not abolish.

The Greeks who dealt with Persia had their own name for its ruler, and their usage is itself evidence of how the title travelled. Ho megas basileus, "the Great King," rendered the Persian xšāyaθiya vazraka so exactly, and referred so unmistakably, that Greek writers routinely shortened it to ho basileus, "the King," with the definite article standing in for a whole empire. Through the fifth and fourth centuries "the King," unnamed, means the Achaemenid and no other, in a Greek world that had many kings of its own.

The usage reached its sharpest point in a document. The peace that closed the Corinthian War in 387/6 BCE, the King's Peace or Peace of Antalcidas, was less negotiated among the Greek states than handed down to them by the Persian king, and Xenophon preserves its text as a royal pronouncement:

King Artaxerxes thinks it just that the cities in Asia should belong to him, as well as Clazomenae and Cyprus among the islands, and that the other Greek cities, both small and great, should be left independent, except Lemnos, Imbros, and Scyros; and these should belong, as of old, to the Athenians. But whichever of the two parties does not accept this peace, upon them I will make war, in company with those who desire this arrangement, both by land and by sea, with ships and with money.

Xenophon, Hellenica 5.1.31^[17]

The Greek cities that prided themselves on their freedom accepted terms dictated by "the King" and guaranteed by his gold. The title the Persians had built to declare a divinely granted supremacy had become, in Greek mouths, the plain name of the greatest power in their world.

Beside the neutral "Great King" the Greeks drew a second portrait, and it is the one that largely conquered the Western imagination: the Great King as the emblem of oriental despotism, fabulously rich, remote, softened by luxury, cruel and capricious, ringed by eunuchs and harem intrigue, a master of slaves rather than a ruler of free men. Herodotus puts the case against one-man rule into the mouth of the Persian Otanes himself, in the Constitutional Debate among the conspirators:

How should the rule of one alone be a well-ordered thing, seeing that the monarch may do what he desires without rendering any account of his acts?

Otanes, in Herodotus 3.80, trans. Macaulay^[18]

This is the ruler accountable to none, who "disturbs the customs handed down from our fathers, is a ravisher of women, and puts men to death without trial." The image is not pure invention: the unaccountable king is a real feature of the office, and Greek writers such as Ctesias, a physician at the court, and Xenophon preserve much genuine detail of court life. But it is refracted through hostility and through the Greeks' own ideology of the free citizen, written mostly about enemies and often long after the events, and it flattens the Persian evidence into caricature. It is the mirror-image of the kings' own inscriptions, and just as partial. Much of the last century's scholarship has gone into undoing it, showing the "decadent" later empire to be a working state and the "servile" court to be a graded order of honour rather than a mass of slaves; but the caricature has proved durable, and the Great King of the Western imagination still owes more to Aeschylus and Herodotus than to anything the Persians said of themselves.

Neither portrait is the empire. The modern reckoning, decisively Kuhrt's, lies between the two and beneath both, and it begins from a caution: the inscriptions and the reliefs give the ideals of the institution, "which should not be confused with the realities."^[10] The gap can be measured. The god most lavishly supplied at Persepolis, the administrative tablets show, was not Ahura Mazdā at all but the old Elamite Humban, so that the tidy theology of the monuments sat on much messier religious ground;^[19] and the ideal of unity in diversity, of many willing peoples upholding one just king, was the propaganda of an empire that also impaled the leaders of the Babylonian revolts and deported whole populations. How far the ideology governed the governing is a live question, and the two-portraits model misleads if it is taken to mean that the inscriptions were mere decoration over a cynical machine. Root's argument runs the other way: the idealised image was itself an instrument of rule, a message pressed on subjects and satraps alike, and the consistency with which it was reproduced across the empire, on cliffs, in palaces, on seals and on coins, is the measure of how seriously the Achaemenids took it. Briant's synthesis holds the two sides together. The king who impaled rebels and the king who prayed for his people against the army, the bad harvest and the Lie are one king, and the ideology of the just, god-given sovereign was the frame within which real power was exercised and justified, not a mask laid over it. The administrative tablets, neither royal proclamation nor Greek polemic, are what let the modern account fall between the two: they show a working monarchy, with its officials, its rations and its many gods, over which the titulary's single righteous king presided as a genuine claim and a genuine instrument, if never quite the flawless guardian of the tombs.

The King of Kings is best understood, then, as the fullest statement the Achaemenids left of how they wished their rule to be seen and obeyed, rather than as a description of how they ruled (see the satrapy system, the royal road and the sources survey).

The title outlived the empire by two millennia. It survived the fall of the dynasty in the local kings of Persis and, more consequentially, in the Parthian revival: in 109 BCE Mithridates II of Parthia took up "King of Kings," and from 96/5 BCE had himself shown on his coins wearing the tiara, a deliberate reach back to the Achaemenid past.^[20] The Sasanians made the claim central. Ardashir I, after defeating the last Parthian king, styled himself on his coinage "the Mazda-worshipping god Ardashir, King of Kings of Ērān," šāhān šāh, the Middle Persian descendant of Darius's xšāyaθiya xšāyaθiyānām.^[20] From šāhān šāh the phrase passed into New Persian as šāhanšāh, the ordinary word for "emperor," and it stayed the title of the rulers of Iran, through many dynasties, down to the last Shah, deposed in 1979; the anniversary celebrations of 1971 at Persepolis, staged among the ruins of Darius's palace, were a conscious and much-criticised claim on exactly this inheritance. Few political formulas have had so long a life: a phrase minted in cuneiform to set one Persian king above the kings of the earth was still, twenty-five centuries later, the official style of a modern state.