Phagos
The phagos was a type of divine ruler present in many Medianic societies of Ascesia, Lestria, and Messenia in the 3rd to 1st millennia BCE. In the hierarchies they were set up at the head of, phagoi were tasked with fairly distributing wealth to their subjects. Their divinity was specifically one that allowed their judgements in this area to be infallible. The phagoi were served by tectons, sacred artisans whose products were usually directly dedicated to the phagos. The divine nature of the tectons' crafts or techne further glorified the phagos as the one honoured by being their recipient, and as the one responsible for fairly sharing them. The phagoi stood at the head of a palace economy, in which they redistributed the products of the tectons out to the wider population, but also in which a great deal of works conducted, like palace-building or the commissioning of art, were to directly glorify themselves. This important religious and economic role is complemented by a relatively weak sense of the phagos as a war-leader, although in many phagistic cultures the phagos was charged with distributing spoils.
The term 'phagos' comes from the Messenian civilisation, roughly meaning 'devourer' in reference to the phagos's ritual consumption of products dedicated in his honour. Its cognates, descendants of proto-Median *bʰeh₂g-, "to divide, distribute", are recognised in other cultures as sources of terms that also relate to phagistic offices, such as Serovitic bhága 'prosperity' or bhaktí 'distribution', or High Secote bogŭ, 'god, wealthy'. The Sagan civilisation also had a phagistic monarch known as the qaghan, while etymological connections between Medianic terms and the elite priest-merchant of its later stages, the bögü (who did indeed appropriate some powers of the qaghan in distributing goods), have been proposed. However, titles directly based on this terminology were rare, and even the Messenian phagos appears to have been invented during the Spring of Democracy with its connotations of 'glutton' serving to act as a form of castigation of the now-circumscribed king by the tectons.