From and until when was the name ‘Abyssinia’ for Ethiopia used internationally?

Answer

Hi Henry,

Fun questions about country names! The region has known many names (Aksum, Kush…), but those two stand out.

• Abyssinia (in English Abyssinia) is indeed derived from the Arabic Al-Habash, which referred to not only the region, but also the Christian populations. The term first appeared on the Ezana stela in Aksum, in which King Esana of Aksum relates how he struck down the Kush and thus became king of Habash peoples. Today, the Christian populations in the Horn of Africa are referred to in Arabic as Abesha. The exact word explanation for Al-Habash is unclear – it may still come from the Semitic languages ​​of the region itself, it may mean ‘land of olives’, or ‘mixture (of peoples)’ but there are question marks to add. Abyssinia is the Latinized form.
• Ethiopia is also an exonym, this time from the Greek: aitho-ops, ‘burnt face’ and referred to the dark complexion of the inhabitants. With Herodotos the term referred to all of Sub-Saharan Africa, in the Bible it became a synonym for Nubia, sometimes for Kush. According to the 3rd century inscription on a throne in the port city of Adulis, the Monumentum Adulitanum, the anonymous king of Aksum had conquered areas bordering Ethiopia to the west. Under King Ezana, that Ethiopia was also conquered by Aksum/Al-Habash, and the name of the newly conquered Ethiopia was used as a synonym for the whole country.

The Aksumites were succeeded in 1137 by the Zagwed dynasty, which in turn was overthrown in 1270 by the Solomon dynasty who, as the name implies, claimed descent not only from the kings of Aksum but even from the biblical Solomon. That dynasty clearly profiled itself as Christian and non-Arab, and therefore described its form of government as ‘Empire of Ethiopia’.

Yet the Solomonites also often used the term ‘Abyssinia’, mainly for two reasons. The first was that the emperors themselves belonged ethnically to Orthodox Christian Abesha, and the second that foreign powers, including Western ones, used the term: the British Punitive Expedition of 1868 was ‘on Abyssinia’ and the short-lived Italian ‘Protectorate of Abyssinia’ was Created in 1889 by the Treaty of Wuchale. At the end of the 19th century, the territory of the Solomonites expanded considerably to the present-day borders of the country of Ethiopia, and also gained international recognition as ‘Abyssinia’, until it was conquered by Italy in 1935 after a dirty war.

After the liberation in 1941, with English and Congolese support, the emperor Haile Selassi consistently chose the term ‘Ethiopia’, perhaps to break with Western colonization attempts, which always used ‘Abyssinian’ names. However, because he also wanted to incorporate Eritrea into his country, which had an earlier Arab population and had been an Italian colony for half a century, the name Ethiopia also took on the connotation of a centralist, monarchist, authoritarian rule in the following decades. The Mengistu dictatorship in 1974-1991, the famines in 1983-1985 and the painful secession of Eritrea in 1991-1993 made that blemish on the name even greater.

And that explains why restaurants, banks and travel agencies prefer to put the somewhat archaic but less politically charged ‘Abyssinia’ in their name.