In the earliest written source of the post-Mycenaean period, in the Homeric epics, one can find a number of words for those who are commonly denoted as kings. Some of them are encountered for the first time as proper names borrowed from Anatolian languages, while others were inherited from previous eras. The most common words in the Homeric epic are ἄναξ and βασιλεύς, which are of special interest to our topic, since they are inherited from the Bronze Age and reflect the most general, rather than local, tendencies in the development of the terminology of power.
