Abyssinia

 ( Historical Regions ) 

In South Arabian texts the name ḤBS²T appears in various inscriptions.Uhlig, Siegbert, ed. Encyclopaedia Aethiopica: D-Ha. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2005. p. 948. One of the earliest known local uses of the term dates to the second or third century Sabaic inscription recounting the Negus ("king") GDRT, another Sabaean inscription mentions mlky hhst dtwns wzqrns (kings of Habashat DTWNS and ZQRNS) Aksum and ḤBŠT. The Ezana Stone also names King Ezana as "king of the Ethiopians", which appears in other Sabaean texts as ḤBS²TM or "Habessinien".

The Hellenized name of Habessinien, ABACIIN appears in an Aksumite coin of c.400 AD, and shortly after the first attestation in late Latin in the form Abissensis. The 6th-century author Stephanus of Byzantium used the term "Αβασηνοί" (i.e. Abasēnoi)

to refer to "an Arabian people living next to the Sabaeans together with the Hadhramaut." The region of the Abasēnoi produced myrrh, incense and cotton and they cultivated a plant which yields a purple dye (probably wars, i.e. Fleminga grahamiana). It lay on a route from Zabīd on the coastal plain to the Ḥimyarite capital Ẓafār. Abasēnoi was located by Hermann Wissmann as a region in the Jabal Ḥubaysh mountain in Ibb Governorate, perhaps related in etymology with the ḥbš Semitic root.Uhlig, Siegbert, ed. Encyclopaedia Aethiopica;: D-Ha. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2005. pp. 949. Modern Western European languages, including English, appear to borrow this term from the post-classical form Abissini in the mid-16th century. (English Abyssin is attested from 1576, and Abissinia and Abyssinia from the 1620s.)

Al-Habash was known in Najashi as a Christian kingdom, guaranteeing its a historical exonym for the Aksumites of antiquity. In the modern day, variations of the term are used in Turkey, Iran, and the Arab World in reference to Ethiopia and as a pan-ethnic word in the west by the Amhara people, Tigray people, and Biher-Tigrinya of Eritrea and Ethiopia (see: Habesha peoples). The Turkish people created the province of Habesh when the Ottoman Empire conquered parts of the coastline of present-day Eritrea starting in 1557. During this, Özdemir Pasha took the port city of Massawa and the adjacent city of Arqiqo.

In the early 1800s British people Capt. S.B. Hanes asserts that the city state of Harar lied within a couple days of Al-Habash.

• Ethiopian Empire
• Ethiopian Highlands
• Habesha people
• Horn of Africa