Hispania - Name

Name

The origin of the word Hispania is much disputed and the evidence for the various speculations are based merely upon what are at best mere resemblances, likely to be accidental, and suspect supporting evidence. One theory holds it to be of Punic derivation, from the Phoenician language of colonizing Carthage. Specifically, it may derive from a Punic cognate of Hebrew אי-שפניא (i-shfania) meaning "Island of the Hyrax" or "island of the hare" or "island of the rabbit" (Phoenician-Punic and Hebrew are both Canaanite languages and therefore closely related to each other). Another theory, proposed by the etymologist Eric Partridge in his work Origins, is that it is of Iberian derivation and that it is to be found in the pre-Roman name for Seville, Hispalis, which strongly hints at an ancient name for the country of *Hispa, an Iberian or Celtic root whose meaning is now lost. It may alternatively derive from Heliopolis (Greek for "city of the sun"). Occasionally it was called Hesperia, "the western land" in Greek, by Roman writers, or Hesperia ultima, since the name had already been used by the Greeks to indicate the Italian peninsula.

Another theory holds that the name derives from Ezpanna, the Basque word for "border" or "edge", thus meaning the farthest area or place. Isidore of Sevilla considered Hispania derived from Hispalis.

Although "Hispania" is the Latin root for the modern name "Spain", substituting Spanish for Hispanicus or Hispanic, or Spain for Hispania, though sometimes done by historians in the more general context of a common peninsular history, is anachronistic and can be misleading, since the borders of modern Spain do not coincide with those of the Roman province of Hispania or of the Visigothic Kingdom of the same name which succeeded it, and have always shifted, and so does not even include the territory of present day Portugal. The Latin term Hispania was often used during Antiquity and the High Middle Ages as a geographical name for the Iberian Peninsula, but its modern cognates, Spain and Spanish, have become increasingly associated with the Kingdom of Spain alone, after the union of the central peninsular Kingdom of Castile with the eastern peninsular Kingdom of Aragon in the 15th century under the Catholic Monarchs.