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One of the aims of this article is to extract, whenever possible, the common elements of several seemingly different types of algebraic hypersystems. In achieving this, one discovers general concepts, constructions, and results which not only generalize and unify the known special situations, thus leading to an economy of presentation, but, being at a higher level of abstraction, can also be applied to entirely new situations, yielding significant information and giving rise to new directions. We shall consider a class of algebraic hypersystems which represent a generalization of semigroups, hypersemigroups, and n-ary semigroups. This new class of hypersystems is called n-ary hypersemigroups and properties of such hypersemigroups are investigated. On an n-ary hypersemigroup, we describe the smallest equivalence relation β* whose quotient is an ordinary n-ary semigroup.