Andrea Balbo - Empire and Politics in the Eastern and Western Civilizations: Searching for a Respublica Romanosinica

The existence of fully egalitarian societies devoid of any idea or practice of sovereignty in social relations is a utopian ideal rather than a reality observed by anthropologists. Even the San hunter-gatherer communities of the Kalahari Desert have hereditary chiefs, although their authority is limited and decisions are based on a consensus in which women and men play equal roles.

The enthronement of the king of the Gypsies in Interwar Poland was sanctified by Orthodox religious rituals. A supernatural element also appeared in other communities whose leaders wanted to base their social position not only on individual merit and personal charisma but also on religious sanction. The Kingdom of Wehali was a ritual center on the south coast of central Timor whose population belonged to the Austronesian South Tetun-speaking area. The leader of the state was originally titled Nai Bot, The Great Lord or Nai Kukun, The Dark Lord, and in the 16th century, he became Maromak Oan, Small Bright One or Child of Luminous, i.e. son of God.

The institution of the hereditary chief had undoubtedly appeared many millennia before the invention of scripture first recorded the name of such a leader in the first documented language of the world. Here we refer to the Sumerian language, in which the kings original designation was lugal, a compound of lu, man, and gal, big. In creating this name, the Sumerians followed the same concept as the 20th-century anthropologists who described the realities of Oceania societies. The oldest inscription with the word lugal, king, to date belongs to the ruler of Kish named Me-bara2-si [Sumerian King List: Enmebaragesi] from around 2600 BCE. The Akkadian r(rum) is the first recorded translation of Sumerian lugal into another language, a Semitic name of a king that corresponds to Hebrew ar, prince, captain, chief, ruler, chieftain, official.

The Akkadian Empire (c. 23342154 BCE) is the first known regional empire in the history of humankind. It stretched from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea, from the Lower Sea to the Upper Sea. Lugalzagesi, king of Sumer, already boasted power over both seas (c. 23582334).

The fourth ruler of the Akkadian Empire, Naram-Sin (22542218 BCE), expressed his universalist ambitions by accepting the title of King of the (Heavens) Four Corners [Quarters] of the World: lugal-an-ub-da-limmu-ba; ar kibrti arbai.

Naram-Sins successor was his son, ar-kali-arri (22182193 BCE), whose name meant King of (all) Kings and would in the future become a form of denoting the supreme ruler in various languages. It was first used by the Assyrian king Tukulti-Ninurta I (12231197 BCE), Assyrian ar arrni, King of Kings. This title, known in Old Persian from the inscription of King Darius at Behistun (Xyathiya Xyathiynm), persisted in the Iranian world regardless of dynastic or religious changes until the fall of the last ruler of Iran (hn h) Reza Pahlavi (1979). Iranian patterns spread to other cultures, including Ethiopia, where the supreme ruler of the Solomonic dynasty was called Ngus Ngst in Geez; the last of these was Haile Selassie (1974).

In modern European languages, it is customary to refer to supreme rulers in Iran and Ethiopia as emperors, but the term king of kings was already known in Greek ( ) from the Hellenistic era. The title of Rajadhiraja, King over Kings, was also known in the Indosphere, but the more popular term was Maharaja, Great King. It was also known in Mesopotamia (arru rabu, e.g., Neo-Assyrian king Sargon II), so that it is impossible to say with certainty whether the Sumerogram LUGAL.GAL, big big-man, for the Hittite king continues some Indo-European tradition or copies of the Mesopotamian traditions later adopted by the Achaemenids, and from them by the Greeks: . This title in turn, worn, among others, by the Seleucid rulers, could also have influenced Indian traditions, where the form