Among the immense collection of the British Museum’s Department of the Middle East, I came across the following document (which appears to have been written by many hands). As to the precise dating of the palimpsest — both of the original text and the various addendums — I have yet been unable to ascertain.
The epithet “King of Kings” first appears in recorded history in the Middle Assyrian Kingdom, when King Tukulti-Ninurta I (r. 1233-1197 BC) claimed the title. He was indeed a mighty ruler, defeating the Hittites, Babylonians, Elamites, and pre-Arab states of Dilmun and Magan. During his pillage of Babylon, Tukulti-Ninurta stole away the golden statue of Marduk, king-god of the local pantheon and so precious to the inhabitants of that city, thus thereby demonstrating his own deity’s supremacy. After a desecration of the temple of Babylon, the “King of Kings’” relationship with his own priesthood began to sour, so he left his capital to build himself a new one. The gods clearly did not favour that course of action as his own sons laid siege and he was soon murdered.
Following the first King of Kings’ death, the “šar šarrāni” title was occasionally claimed by rulers of both Assyria and Babylon, though Sargon II, great-grandfather of Arshurbanipal, preferred instead the humble moniker, “King of the Universe”.
Tukulti-Ninurta’s title didn’t reach its most famed usage until the rise of the Achaemenid Empire of Persia, which in their tongue read: “Xšāyaθiya Xšāyaθiyānām.” After the fall of the Medes — who may have used the title themselves, though it’s disputed — Cyrus the Great soon swallowed the entire Near East and Asia Minor, before his son added Egypt to the then largest empire in history. Truly, the Persian kings felt they deserved their title, for they often allowed the monarchs they defeated in battle to remain in situ as vassals, so long as the vanquished showed them proper deference. Indeed, they were not shy in making it known how superior they were; even today, one can set forth to Armenia and find there among their ruins an inscription that reads: “I AM XERXES, THE GREAT KING, KING OF KINGS, THE KING OF THE PROVINCES WITH MANY TONGUES, THE KING OF THIS GREAT EARTH FAR AND NEAR, SON OF KING DARIUS THE ACAEMENIAN.”
Later, the great and heroic Alexander, after sweeping away the last of the Persian King of Kings, preferred not to adopt his enemy’s mantle, donning instead, “King of Asia,” though some of his lesser successors in the Seleucid dynasty revived it in subsequent centuries. The Iranians reclaimed the title for themselves after Mithrades of Parthia rebelled against his Hellenic overlords, and it was passed from one usurper dynasty to another when the Sassanians rose up and supplanted his descendants.
By this time the title had achieved fame elsewhere too, with claimants appearing in Armenia, Ethiopia, and India. We are commonly told that the moniker only died out in the 13th-century when the Kingdom of Georgia succumbed to the Mongol conquests, but this is a mistake: the kingdom revived after a few decades of invasions and plagues, only to finally collapse for good in the 15th-century, taking the title with them.
Despite there being no apparent lack of great kings in subsequent centuries (Genghis Khan, Babur, Timur) no other claimants to the mantle have yet arisen. Still we await the next… KING OF KINGS.
[Here the hand changes, as if the following passage was written by another.]
This author would put forward a tentative proposal: that in fact the King of Kings cannot, and could never have been, an actual ruler, no matter how many other kings he had forced to bend the knee. Instead, the true master of kings — the true “King of Kings” — was in fact the chronicler through whose words we claim to know the deeds, temperaments, and personalities of these so-called great men of history. It it not through Herodotus that we hear that Cyrus was the great father, Cambyses the tyrant son, and Darius the usurper? Was it not Xenophon’s words that inspired Alexander to take up his sword and test its point in the East? Was it not through the studious chronicling of the Alexandrian scholars that we today can know the lives of these once-bethroned men? Indeed, the King of Kings is not a still great king, but the man with the pen who records their names for posterity.
[Here the hand changes again.]
As I am the latest such author to write the histories of these men, I hereby humbly declare that it is I who am the King of Kings.
[Here the page is marked by a spatter of what looks like blood, and the hand changes for the last time.]
No more, my dear brother. It is in fact I who is the last and the true KING OF KINGS.
Quick, somebody stab M. E. Rothwell and claim the title for themselves!
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
The words “King of Kings” in this substack immediately transported me back to my first year at university in South Africa. Born from Dutch immigrants, growing up in an Afrikaans community, English was as foreign as Greek. We Boertjies struggled mightily at school with the strange tenses and weird pronunciations. And for every rule there was an exception. So what possessed me to take English as a first year subject at varsity? Maybe because I recognised Shakespeare’s genius in The Merchant of Venice in my matric year ... although I could barely understand it. English I at varsity was the best struggle of my life. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem Ozymandias was one of many wonderful poems in my Albatross Book of Verse. Not that I could immediately fathom most of the poems … I waded through every poem and prescribed book with my faithful dictionary at my side. It was slow-going, pencilling the Afrikaans translation above every second word. Sometimes the dictionary made things even more difficult by giving many translations or meanings for a word. But wow, what a wonderful world eventually opened up before me. After varsity I bought myself all the English children’s classics I was deprived of and enjoyed a belated enchanted childhood. Today I feel like a King of Kings (though female), having a vast fortune of English literature at my fingertips. My poor mother tried very hard, but never managed to speak English … the word “vegetables” slayed her.