queensthief | (no subject)

Ok, so I know there are some brilliant, wonderful, intelligent, educated people around here that know all these things already, but *I* don't, so when I stumbled across this, it made me positively gleeful:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basileus

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 basileis 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.

Oh, and something totally random and off topic...

At work today one of the guys I work with said, "I had a bad dream last night, and I blame you."
"Oh? What did I do?"
"Well, you know that book you were talking about awhile ago, where one of the characters hand gets cut off?"
"Yeah..."
"Well, in my dream last night, my hand got cut off. And then this person, who in my dream was the character from the book whose hand was cut off even though I really don't have any idea what he looks like or anything, came and just put a rag over it and said 'don't worry, it'll stop bleeding soon,' And then I woke up because my hand hurt. So now I have to read those books to find out what happened."

I was amused.

*scurries away*