Hispania was the name given by the Romans to the Iberian Peninsula and part of the official nomenclature of the three Roman provinces that they created there: Hispania Ulterior Baetica, Hispania Citerior Tarraconensis and Hispania Ulterior Lusitania. Other provinces formed later, were Carthaginensis and Gallaecia. Consecutively the concept evolved to include, in the final epoch of the empire, the province of Balearica and the province of Mauritania Tingitana.
The name of Spain derives from Hispania, the name by which the Romans designated the entire Iberian Peninsula, an alternative term to the name Iberia preferred by Greek authors to speak of the same space. But nevertheless; The fact that the term Hispania is not of Latin root has led to the formulation of several theories about its origin, some of them controversial.
The most accepted etymologies currently prefer to assume a Phoenician origin of the word. In 1674, the Frenchman Samuel Bochart, based on a text by Gaius Valerio Catulo, in which he called Spain cuniculosa (rabbit), proposed that there could be the origin of the word Spain. In this way, he deduced that in Hebrew (Semitic language, related to Phoenician) the word spʰ (a) n could mean 'rabbit', since the Phoenician term i-šphanim would literally mean: ¨damanes¨ (i-šphanim is the A plural form of i-šaphán, 'damán', Hyrax syriacus), which was how the Phoenicians decided, for lack of a better word, to call the rabbit Oryctolagus cuniculus, an animallittle known by them and that was extremely abundant in the peninsula. Another version of this same etymology would be ¨i-šphanim¨ Island of rabbits. This second explanation is necessary because in classical Latin the H aspirated is pronounced, making it impossible to derive it from the initial S (Grimm and Verner's laws).
