Bilqis

The name

Bilqīs is not an Arabic word. It has no root the lexicographers assign it and no derivation they propose; it is counted among the foreign proper names, of South Arabian form, and is treated as a diptote for being both a proper name and non-Arabic. This reference gives it no Arabic etymology, because inventing one would be inventing a fact.

What the Qurʾān says and does not say

The story is in sura al-Naml: the hoopoe returns to Sulaymān with news of a people of Sabaʾ ruled by a woman who has been given of everything and has a mighty throne; the letter, the gift she sends back, the pavilion of glass. The Qurʾān never names her. She is 'a woman ruling over them', and that is all the text supplies. The name Bilqīs reaches us from the exegetes and the historians, who identify the unnamed queen and give her a name, a genealogy among the kings of Ḥimyar, and a reign. That distinction — between what the text says and what the tradition supplies — is the single most useful thing to know about this name, and it applies equally to Āsiya and the wife of Pharaoh.

Sabaʾ, Maʾrib and Ṣanʿāʾ

Sabaʾ is a kingdom of Yemen, and its seat in the geographies is Maʾrib, the town of the famous dam whose bursting the sources make an epoch in the history of the Arabs. Yāqūt records both, and al-Hamdānī, who knew the country at first hand, describes the ruined works of the Sabaean kings across the region. Ṣanʿāʾ, the great city of the highlands, belongs to the same Yemeni frame, and the traditions about her move between the two.

Bearing the name

Bilqīs remains a current female name, particularly in Yemen. Nothing about it establishes descent: a name taken from a figure of the historical tradition is a naming choice, not a line of ancestry, and no family's nasab follows from it.