Kuhbanan (Persian: كوهبنان, also Romanized as Kūhbanān, Koobanan, Kūhbonān, and Kūh Banān; also known as Kūh Baneh)[3] is a city in the Central District of Kuhbanan County, Kerman province, Iran, serving as capital of both the county and the district.[4]
At the 2006 National Census, its population was 10,112 in 2,623 households.[5] The following census in 2011 counted 11,093 people in 3,189 households.[6] The latest census in 2016 showed a population of 10,761 people in 3,296 households.[2]
Etymology
The name Kūhbanān means "pistachio-tree mountain", from the Persian words kūh, meaning "mountain", and banān, which refers to the wild pistachio.[7]
History
Kuhbanan was described by the 10th-century writer al-Muqaddasi as a small town with two gates. The town's jameh mosque was by one of these gates. Outside the walled part of the city was a suburban area, where there were bathhouses and caravanserais. Beyond this suburban area, Kuhbanan was surrounded by farms and orchards that extended as far as the foot of the nearby mountains.[7]
Medieval Kuhbanan was renowned for its production of tutty, an impure oxide of zinc used as a salve for the eyes. As early as the 10th century, al-Muqaddasi listed tutty from Kuhbanan as one of the major exports of Kerman province. He wrote that it formed in finger-like "pipes", which were then purified by being roasted in long furnaces by the same mountainside where the ore was extracted. In the early 1200s, Yaqut al-Hamawi similarly described Kuhbanan, along with the nearby town of Behabad, as a major exporter of tutty. Marco Polo visited Kuhbinan, which he called Cobinan, in the 1300s, and provided a detailed description of the local tutty industry. Around the turn of the 20th century, the British traveler Percy Sykes witnessed the production of tutty in Kuhbanan; the process he described was essentially the same as that used hundreds of years earlier.[7]
^Kuhbanan can be found at GEOnet Names Server, at this link, by opening the Advanced Search box, entering "-3072278" in the "Unique Feature Id" form, and clicking on "Search Database".
^Aref, Mohammada Reza (25 November 1383). "Divisional reforms and changes in Kerman province". Islamic Parliament Research Center of the Islamic Republic of Iran (in Persian). Ministry of Interior, Political-Defense Commission of the Government Board. Archived from the original on 14 April 2021. Retrieved 2 February 2024.
