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( Basileus)
Basileus (Greek ([?as??e??]&_160;(helpยทinfo)), plural ?as??e??, basileis), signifies "sovereign" or "king". It is perhaps best known in English as a title used by Byzantine emperors, but also has a longer history of use for persons of authority in ancient Greece, as well as for the kings of modern Greece. The etymology of basileus is unclear. The Mycenaean form was gwasileus (????????, qa-si-re-u), denoting some sort of court official or local chieftain, but not an actual king. Most linguists assume that it is a non-Greek word that was adopted by Bronze Age Greeks from a preexisting linguistic substrate of the Eastern Mediterranean. Schindler (1976) argues for an inner-Greek innovation of the -eus inflection type from Indo-European material rather than a "Mediterranean" loan. The first written instance of this word is found on the baked clay tablets discovered in excavations of Mycenaean palaces originally destroyed by fire. The tablets are dated from the 15th century BC to the 11th century BC. They were inscribed with the Linear B script, which was deciphered by Michael Ventris in 1952 and corresponds to a very early form of Greek. The word basileus is written as qa-si-re-u and its original meaning was "chieftain" (in one particular tablet the chieftain of the guild of bronzesmiths is referred to as qa-si-re-u). The word can be contrasted with wanax, another word used more specifically for "king" and usually meaning "High King" or "overlord". With the collapse of Mycenaean society, the position of wanax disappeared, and the basileus were left as the topmost officials in Greek society. In the works of Homer wanax appears, in the form anax, mostly in descriptions of Zeus (as king of the gods) and of very few human monarchs, most notably Agamemnon. Otherwise the term survived almost exclusively in personal names (e.g., Anaxagoras, Pleistoanax) and in modern Greek is still in use in the description of the royal palace i.e. anactora meaning "The mansion of anax". Most of the Greek leaders in Homer's works are described as basileis, which is conventionally rendered in English as "kings". However, a more accurate translation may be "princes" or "chieftains", which would better reflect conditions in Greek society in Homer's time, and also the roles ascribed to Homer's characters. Agamemnon tries to order around Achilles among many others, while another basileus serves as his charioteer.
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