"King of Kings" and "Lord of Kingdoms"

Abstract

It is well known that Assyrian kings occasionally and Persian kings regularly styled themselves "king of kings" and that the Greek sovereigns of Egypt regularly described themselves as "lord of kingdoms."' Early Northwest Semitic forms of the first of these titles are mlk mlkym (Ezek. 26:7)2 in Hebrew, and mlk zy m[lkyD] (CIS, II, 122) or mlk mlkyD (Dan. 2:37;2 Ezra 6:12). As regards the official designation of the Ptolemies, it has always been recognized that the Phoenician Ddn mlkm represents it in CIS, I, 93, 95, and elsewhere, and almost three years ago I was able to prove that it is in fact the exact linguistic equivalent of kyrios basilei6n.3 Since this observation made it seem stranger than ever that in CIS, I, 3 (the Eshmunazar inscription), the same title should, as had been generally assumed, designate an Achaemenian ruler, I re-examined the evidence for such an early dating of this document and found it inconclusive; and, on the other hand, I discovered that not only this monument but even that of its recipient's father, Tabnit, contained an unmistakable Hellenism.4 I was thus led to date the entire family of Eshmunazarid inscriptions,5 with Clermont-Ganneau and Cooke, in the late fourth and/or early third century B.C. A year and a half later, however, Galling,6 while admitting that Ddn mlkm means 'lord of kingdoms"'7 literally as well as-with the sole alleged exception of this case-by usage, took up the cudgels again