The King of Kings

"King of kings" (Old Persian xšāyaθiya xšāyaθiyānām) is the title by which the Achaemenid ruler named himself at the head of almost every inscription he left, and it is the seed of a whole theory of the world. It says that above the many kings of the earth's many peoples there stands one king; that his office is part of the good order of creation; and that he holds it not by his own strength but by the favour of Ahura Mazdā, the greatest of the gods. This entry is about that office as the kings themselves presented it (the titulary and its antecedents, the gift of rule, the king as guardian of right order against the Lie, the virtues carved on the tomb, the veiled majesty of the court, and the succession), and about the gap, insisted on by modern scholarship, between this magnificent self-portrait and both the workaday realities of governing and the hostile caricature the Greeks drew. Because no Achaemenid ever set out a theory of kingship in the abstract, the surest way in is through the words the kings actually carved; and a caution, borrowed from Amélie Kuhrt, must stand at the threshold: the inscriptions give the ideals of the institution, "which should not be confused with the realities."

The title and its meaning

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," is the ruler magnified 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 / of the peoples," ties the office to the empire's astonishing extent. The Old Persian noun xšaça ("kingdom, rule, dominion, kingship") is the same word that stands inside the title of the provincial governor, the xšaçapāvan ("protector of the realm/kingship"), the satrap: the empire was, from top to bottom, a structure of kingship and its keepers.

The phrase 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 I, the Gate of All Nations, Persepolis, XPa)

The formula outlived the dynasty entirely: it passed through Parthian šāhān šāh into Sasanian and thence into New Persian šāhanšāh, the standard word for "emperor" down to the twentieth century; the Greeks rendered it (and the plain xšāyaθiya vazraka) as ho megas basileus, "the Great King," so unmistakable a designation that a Greek could write simply "the King" and mean the Persian.

Antecedents: an inherited majesty

The Achaemenids did not invent the idea of a king over kings; they inherited and recombined it. The title šar šarrāni, "king of kings," had been borne by Assyrian monarchs (and reaches back to the kings of a much older Mesopotamia); the phrasing "king of the four quarters," "king of the lands," is the ancient boast of the rulers of the Tigris and Euphrates. Cyrus, taking Babylon in 539, had himself proclaimed in exactly that inherited Babylonian 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, lines 20–21, trans. Mordechai Cogan)

Behind the Persians stood the Medes, from whom, the Greeks believed, they took much of the etiquette and ceremonial of monarchy, and behind the Medes, Assyria again. Kuhrt stresses a nearer and more concrete root: the Elamite. The Persian kingdom's own memory reached back, by the reckoning of the Cyrus Cylinder, to "Teispes, Great King of Anshan" (Anshan an old Elamite royal centre, "Great King of Anshan" an Elamite title), and recent scholarship has made ever clearer how much of Persian iconography, dress, cult, bureaucracy and script was Elamite in origin. The King of Kings was thus a deliberate composite: an Iranian ruler clothing a very old Near Eastern majesty in a new, Persian dress. What was new with Darius was the articulation of it in words. The royal voice, as Kuhrt puts it, "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."

"By the favour of Ahuramazda": kingship as a gift

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, his tomb at Naqsh-e Rostam, DNa)

As Kuhrt observes, this "presents the institution of kingship as part of Ahuramazda's beneficent creation": 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, so that king and god "complement each other in the universe working for the same ends." The king never claims to have won his vast realm by his own arm; it is bestowed on him, and many inscriptions close with a prayer that the god who gave it protect it. The formula that everywhere carries the point is vašnā Auramazdāha, "by the favour / grace of Ahuramazda": Darius is king, and won his battles, by the favour of the god. 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 against 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, his tomb at Naqsh-e Rostam, DNa)

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," no more. There is no Achaemenid ruler-cult of the living king. That distinguishes the King of Kings sharply from the divine pharaoh whose throne Cambyses and Darius also took, and from the deified Hellenistic monarchs who came after.

The King and the order of the world: arta against the Lie

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

"As to these provinces which revolted, the Lie made them revolt, so that they deceived the people." (Darius I, Behistun, DB §54)

So the king can present rebellion as an offence against Ahura Mazdā himself, "by them (the rebels) Ahuramazda was not worshipped" (DB §72–75), and can pray, in the same breath, against war, dearth and falsehood together, the three faces of disorder. And the king's own legitimacy rests 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, Behistun, DB §63)

A precise and much-quoted point of the record must be foregrounded here, and it 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 the positive word for truth and right order, arta (the exact cognate of Vedic ṛta and Avestan aša), scarcely appears in the royal inscriptions at all: it surfaces, of the kings, only in Xerxes' daiva-inscription, where he worships "Ahuramazda and arta." As Kuhrt notes flatly, "the implied opposite, truth = OPers. arta, does not appear in the Achaemenid inscriptions." The King of Kings is thus, in his own words, less the herald of arta than the enemy* of the Lie: the right order he guards is defined by what threatens it. That the concept of right order is nonetheless everywhere present (in the very structure of a creation to be kept whole, in the justice the king claims) while its name is nearly absent, is one of the genuine puzzles of Achaemenid ideology (see arta).

The virtues on the tomb

The fullest statement of what a King of Kings ought to be is carved on the tomb of Darius at Naqsh-e Rostam (the passage modern 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 a personal boast of one man but "a statement of what it means to be a Persian king," the duties the office imposes and the qualities it demands. The king is a just judge who will not be moved by hearsay:

"What a man says against a man, that does not convince me, until I hear the testimony of both." (Darius I, his tomb, DNb)

He rewards and punishes strictly by desert, "the man who serves, him I reward according to his service; the man who does harm, him I punish according to the harm", and he masters himself before he masters others:

"I am not hot-tempered. What things develop in my anger, I hold firmly under control by my thinking power." (Darius I, his tomb, DNb)

His discernment (he can tell right from wrong), his self-command (he governs his temper, so his judgements are weighed and fair), his firmness against wrongdoing, and his readiness to reward loyal service to the limit of a subject's ability: these are the moral equipment of kingship. And to them the text adds the physical: the king is not only fit to rule but fit to fight, for the wars that hold the empire together and keep chaos at bay:

"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, his tomb, DNb)

The archer, the horseman, the just judge, the master of his own anger: this is the ideal the reliefs echo, the king, spear and bow in hand, the hero who in the palace doorways of Persepolis triumphs over lion and monster, the eternal image of order overcoming the beast of disorder.

The regalia, the audience, and proskynesis

The majesty was made visible. On the audience relief from Persepolis the king sits enthroned beneath a canopy, robed in the long pleated Persian court dress, a tall fluted tiara on his head, a long staff in his right hand and a lotus blossom in his left; behind him an attendant holds a fan and a fly-whisk, a guardsman his spear, while a Median usher presents the visitors. The court robe itself was a thing of power, the kandys or sleeved robe, purple and worked with gold, so much the king's own that to be given one was a signal honour and to presume to it was death. And no one came into the presence of the King of Kings without first performing proskynesis, the act of obeisance the Greeks found so foreign and so telling:

"The law of the Persians is, that he who cometh into the King's presence shall not speak with him till he hath first adored him." (Aelian, Varia Historia 1.21, trans. Thomas Stanley, 1665)

What exactly proskynesis was (a full prostration, a bow, a blown kiss, graded by the rank of the person performing it) the sources leave uncertain, and the Greeks, who reserved such a gesture for the gods, persistently misread as worship what for Persians marked social distance before a superior, not divinity. It is the visible form of the whole theory of the office: an unbridgeable gap between the king and every subject, ceremony standing in for the god-king the Persians did not in fact have.

The King as the still centre: the court and the veiled majesty

Around that seated figure turned an immense and moving world. The imperial court did not sit in one place: the king and his household migrated with the seasons. Kuhrt's predecessor at Iranica, Muhammad Dandamayev, gathers the Greek reports that autumn and winter were passed at Babylon, spring at Susa, summer at Ecbatana, the great festivals kept at Persepolis, the crowning done at Pasargadae. At the centre "lived in seclusion" the "sacred figure of the king," and access to him was itself a currency of power: beside his mother and his principal wife, only the men of the six noblest Persian houses, the descendants of the Seven who had helped Darius to the throne (see the accession of Darius), held the right of unannounced approach. For everyone else the gate was guarded, literally, by an officer: the hazārapatiš, the "commander of a thousand" (Greek chiliarch), captain of the thousand-strong royal bodyguard and, by Cornelius Nepos' reckoning, "the second position after the king," through whom a petition to the presence had to pass. A tremendous machinery surrounded the throne: royal judges appointed for life who advised on law and custom; the "eyes and ears of the king," agents independent of the satraps who reported sedition directly; benefactors (orosangai) whose services were entered on a roll and repaid with robes, gold, horses and whole villages; scribes writing in Elamite, Aramaic and Akkadian; and thousands fed daily at the king's expense. The distance was the point. The King of Kings ruled less by being seen than by being, mostly, unseen, the hidden magnificence in the innermost palace that 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 6, 398a, trans. E. S. Forster)

Succession and legitimacy

For all its cosmic framing, Achaemenid kingship had no simple, safe rule of succession, and legitimacy was a thing to be asserted. Darius, who "was certainly not in the direct line of succession" (Briant), had the greatest need to assert it, and Behistun is in large part an apologia, an elaborate defence of an irregular seizure of the throne, dressed as the restoration of a right order broken by an impostor and a swarm of liars. He anchors his right in blood, reciting a royal genealogy 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, Behistun, DB §§3–4)

Descent from Achaemenes, made the eponymous founder of the line only with Darius, became the indispensable credential, so that scholars now distinguish an earlier "Teispid" line (Cyrus, Cambyses) from the "Achaemenid" line Darius asserted. The version of his accession-story was broadcast: copies of the Behistun text have been found as far off as Babylon and, in Aramaic, at Elephantine in Egypt, and a form of it was even set on his tomb. Legitimacy, once seized, then normally passed within the ruling house, but not without struggle: the king in principle named his heir, the choice ideally falling on a son "born in the purple" after the father's accession (the argument that carried the day for Xerxes over an elder half-brother), and a contested succession (Xerxes' own murder, the bloodletting that opened later reigns) was a recurring danger the ideology of the one god-given king could paper over but never abolish.

The Greek image, and the reality behind both

The portrait so far is the king's own. Beside it the Greeks drew another, and it is the one that largely conquered the Western imagination: the Great King as the very type of the "oriental despot": fabulously rich, remote, effeminate with luxury, cruel, capricious, surrounded 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 famous Constitutional Debate:

"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?" (Herodotus, Histories 3.80, trans. Macaulay)

This is the despot who "disturbs the customs handed down from our fathers, is a ravisher of women, and puts men to death without trial." This image is not simply invention: the accountable-to-none 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 polis-ideology of the free citizen, written mostly about enemies and often long after the events, and it flattens the Persian evidence into caricature. This is exactly why Kuhrt and the modern school insist on privileging the inscriptions and the iconography (the king's picture of himself, checked against the administrative tablets) over the classical writers, "despite their potential value," as the safer road to how the Persians "visualized their office and power." The honest reckoning lies between the two portraits and beneath both. The king was neither the flawless guardian of his own inscriptions nor merely the Greeks' gilded tyrant. The god who was "by far most frequently honored and lavishly supplied" at Persepolis, the tablets show, was not even Ahura Mazdā but the old Elamite god Humban, a reminder that the tidy theology of the monuments sat atop a messier religious reality; and the ideal of unity-in-diversity, of many willing peoples bearing up one just king, was propaganda for an empire that also impaled the leaders of the Babylonian revolts. The King of Kings is best understood not as a fact about how the Achaemenids ruled but as the most sustained and eloquent statement they left of how they wished their rule to be seen, and, in the seeing, obeyed. On that reading its greatest monument is a claim and a warning at once, the whole weight of the world set above one throne, and every great servant of it held in the bind of a majesty he could serve but never rival (see the satrapy system, the royal road, and the sources and how we know).