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Kuhbanan
 Kuhbanan (Persian: كوهبنان)[a] is a city in the Central District of Kuhbanan County, Kerman province, Iran, serving as capital of both the county and the district.[4] EtymologyThe name Kūhbanān means "pistachio-tree mountain", from the Persian words kūh, meaning "mountain", and banān, which refers to the wild pistachio.[5] HistoryKuhbanan 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.[5] 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.[5] DemographicsPopulationAt the time of the 2006 National Census, the city's population was 10,112 in 2,623 households.[6] The following census in 2011 counted 11,093 people in 3,189 households.[7] The 2016 census measured the population of the city as 10,761 people in 3,296 households.[2] See alsoNotesReferences
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