Countries Named After People: Bolívar, Columbus, Philip II and the Rest

At least a dozen sovereign countries are named after people: Bolivia after Simón Bolívar, Colombia after Christopher Columbus, the Philippines after King Philip II of Spain, Saudi Arabia after the House of Saud, the United States of America after Amerigo Vespucci, Israel after the biblical patriarch Jacob, Liechtenstein after its ruling princely family, Mauritius after Maurice of Nassau, Seychelles after the French finance minister Jean Moreau de Séchelles, the Marshall Islands after Captain John Marshall, Kiribati after Captain Thomas Gilbert and Solomon Islands after the biblical King Solomon. Add the saints and holy figures behind El Salvador, São Tomé and Príncipe, Saint Lucia, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and the Dominican Republic, and the figure passes 15. Below, the names run oldest first, with language and date.

Yisraʾel: a Hebrew name on an Egyptian stele, late 13th century BCE

The oldest name in this group belongs to Israel. In Hebrew it is יִשְׂרָאֵל, Yisraʾel, usually explained as "El (God) persists" or "El rules". In the Book of Genesis it is the new name given to the patriarch Jacob after he wrestles through the night at a river ford, and the "Children of Israel" (Benei Yisraʾel) are his descendants.

The earliest physical record of the name comes from Egypt, not Israel. The Merneptah Stele, a black granite slab carved for Pharaoh Merneptah in the late 13th century BCE and now in Cairo, lists a people called Israel among the pharaoh's defeated enemies in Canaan. It is the oldest known artefact to use the word for a group of people.

The modern state picked the name up again only at its founding. When the state was declared in 1948, the leadership also considered Eretz Israel (Land of Israel), Zion, Judea and Ever, from the ancestor Eber. David Ben-Gurion proposed Israel and it passed by six votes to three. Medinat Yisraʾel, "State of Israel", has been the official name ever since.

America: Waldseemüller's Latin coinage, 25 April 1507

The United States carries a person's name at second hand. "America" was coined by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, working at Saint-Dié-des-Vosges in Lorraine. His world map of 1507 was the first to show the New World as a landmass separate from Asia. On it the word AMERICA is printed across what is now South America. The book that came with the map, the Cosmographiae Introductio, gives the reason: the land should be called after "Americus", the Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci, whose accounts of his voyages for Spain and Portugal were widely read.

About 1,000 copies of the map were printed, and only one complete copy is known to survive. That copy resurfaced among the books of a Württemberg castle, Schloss Wolfegg, in 1901; a century later, in 2001, the Library of Congress paid ten million dollars for it. A few minority theories link "America" to the Amerrisque mountains of Nicaragua or to Richard Amerike, a Bristol merchant. Neither has displaced the Vespucci derivation, which the map's own text states outright. Once the Declaration of Independence spoke of the "united States of America" in 1776, Vespucci's first name became part of a country's official name.

Felipinas: Villalobos's Spanish tribute, 1542–43

On his expedition of 1542–43, the Spanish navigator Ruy López de Villalobos named the islands of Leyte and Samar "Felipinas" after the young Prince of Asturias, who later reigned as King Philip II of Spain. Over time Las Islas Filipinas came to mean the whole archipelago under Spanish rule. Miguel López de Legazpi began that rule in 1565. The Malolos Congress proclaimed the República Filipina in 1899. "Republic of the Philippines" was written into the 1935 constitution and has stayed in every constitution since.

The same Iberian voyages left several other personal names on the map. Álvaro de Mendaña reached Santa Isabel on 7 February 1568. He named single islands, not the group. Later mapmakers who heard of his voyage called the archipelago Islas Salomón, hoping it held the gold of the biblical King Solomon's Ophir, and Solomon Islands kept the name at independence in 1978. Mozambique takes its name from Mozambique Island. That name probably comes from an Arab ruler or trader, recorded in versions such as Mussa Ben Mbiki or Musa Al Big, who was living there when Vasco da Gama called in 1498. The sources disagree on his name, so the link is only probable. Then there are the saints' days. São Tomé was sighted on St Thomas's Day, 21 December, in 1470 or 1471. Saint Vincent is said to have been sighted by Columbus on St Vincent's Day, 22 January, and named for that saint. Santo Domingo, which gave the Dominican Republic its name, honours St Dominic.

Prins Maurits van Nassaueiland and Isle de Séchelles, 1598 and 1756

Two Indian Ocean islands were named by trading empires after men at home. In 1598 a Dutch squadron under Admiral Wybrand van Warwyck landed at Grand Port and named the uninhabited island Prins Maurits van Nassaueiland. The name honoured Maurice of Nassau (1567–1625), Prince of Orange and stadtholder of Holland. French colonists renamed it Isle de France in 1715, but after Britain seized the island in 1810 the Latinised Mauritius returned, and the country kept it at independence.

Seychelles took its name 158 years later. In 1756, with Britain and France already fighting the war that became the Seven Years' War, the French administration on Isle de France sent Corneille Nicolas Morphey to claim the islands to the north-east. He named the largest one Isle de Séchelles after Jean Moreau de Séchelles, finance minister to Louis XV, and took possession on 1 November 1756. The largest island later reverted to Mahé, while the minister's name passed to the whole group, spelled the English way.

Liechtenstein: an imperial German decree of 23 January 1719

Liechtenstein's name belonged to its ruling family before it belonged to any land. In German it means roughly "bright stone", from the dynasty's ancestral castle in Lower Austria. The princes held large estates in Austria, Bohemia and Moravia, but none were held directly from the emperor, so they had no seat in the Imperial Diet. To get one, Prince Johann Adam Andreas bought the Lordship of Schellenberg in 1699 and the County of Vaduz in 1712. On 23 January 1719 Emperor Charles VI joined them into a principality "with the name Liechtenstein" for Prince Anton Florian. The result, a Rhine-valley state of about 160 km², still bears the family's name. When the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved in 1806, the prince ceased to owe allegiance to any overlord.

Marshall and Gilbert: British captains on the 1788 charts

One voyage in 1788 named two Pacific states. Captains John Marshall of the Scarborough and Thomas Gilbert of the Charlotte had brought convicts to Botany Bay with the First Fleet. They were sailing on to Canton when they passed through the central Pacific. On 25 June 1788 their crews traded with islanders at Mili Atoll. Later charts named the northern chains the Marshall Islands. The Marshallese render the name as Majeļ, and the republic kept it at independence.

Gilbert's name took a longer route. Around 1820 the Russian admiral Adam von Krusenstern and the French captain Louis Duperrey wrote îles Gilbert on their charts. Britain used "Gilbert Islands" for its protectorate from 1892 and in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony from 1916. At independence in 1979 the country took the Gilbertese spelling of "Gilberts", Kiribati. In Gilbertese spelling "ti" stands for an "s" sound, which is why Kiribati is pronounced KIRR-i-bass.

Colombia and Bolivia: Spanish-American republics, 1819 and 1825

Both South American eponyms came out of the wars of independence. "Colombia" was the idea of the Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda. He took the Neo-Latin "Columbia", from Columbus's surname, as a name for all of Spain's American colonies, and used a quasi-Greek adjectival form of it as the title of his own revolutionary archive. In 1819 the Congress of Angostura gave the name to a real state. Gran Colombia joined present-day Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama under President Simón Bolívar until it broke up in 1831. The Bogotá-centred rump was called New Granada from 1831 and the Granadine Confederation from 1858. It took the name Colombia again in 1863, as the United States of Colombia, in honour of Bolívar's larger republic, and has been the Republic of Colombia since 1886.

Bolivia was named for Bolívar while he was alive, and partly to win him over. Upper Peru, ruled from the Audiencia of Charcas in Chuquisaca (modern Sucre), could have stayed with Peru or joined the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata. Antonio José de Sucre let a national assembly decide, and on 6 August 1825 it declared independence. Bolívar had doubts, so the deputies named the state the República Bolívar and made him its first president. At the urging of the congressman Manuel Martín Cruz the name was soon shortened to Bolivia. Bolívar's surname itself is a place name: it comes from the village of Bolibar in Biscay, Basque for "windmill valley".

Al-Mamlaka al-ʿArabiyya as-Suʿūdiyya: Abdulaziz's decree of 23 September 1932

The newest name on the list is also the most openly dynastic. After uniting the Kingdom of Hejaz and Nejd, Abdulaziz ibn Saud issued a royal decree on 23 September 1932. It named the state المملكة العربية السعودية, al-Mamlaka al-ʿArabiyya as-Suʿūdiyya, usually translated "Kingdom of Saudi Arabia" but closer to "the Saudi Arab Kingdom". "Saudi" is a nisba, an Arabic adjective, formed from Al Saud, "House of Saud". That family takes its name from Saud ibn Muhammad ibn Muqrin, father of Muhammad bin Saud, who founded the dynasty in the 18th century. Putting the dynasty's name inside the state's name expresses the view that the country is the personal possession of the royal family.

The oldest of these names came from scripture, the early modern ones from European crowns, ministers and sea captains. For names taken from landscape instead of people, see our guide to countries named after rivers. For peoples rather than persons, read countries named after tribes. And for states that dropped an older name altogether, from Ceylon to Swaziland, see the history of countries that changed their name.