Sandalwood in Persian and Zoroastrian tradition

Sandalwood’s history in Persia is shorter and later than it is often said to be. The ancient evidence that circulates does not survive checking. What is well documented belongs to three later strands: the language, medieval medicine, and the fire ritual of the Parsis, the Zoroastrian community that settled in India.

The word came west through Persian

The English word is Persian at one remove. Sanskrit candana became Middle Persian čandal; Arabic, which has no ch sound, took it as ṣandal; Byzantine Greek made it santalon; and it reached English through Latin and French in the fourteenth century. Persian kept both forms: chandan, and the Arabic loan ṣandal.

The scholar al-Bīrūnī, writing around 1050, went further. He traced the Arabic words for pharmacy and pharmacist, ṣaydana and ṣaydalānī, to the same root, from the trade in scents and medicines made from sandalwood. That is his explanation, not a settled etymology, but it shows how closely the material and the profession were linked.

A word for the wood and the paste

In classical Persian, ṣandal did not only mean the timber. Steingass’s Persian dictionary of 1892 defines it as:

Sandal, an odoriferous wood; a perfumed embrocation obtained by rubbing a piece of sandal-wood with water on a stone.

That is the stone method exactly, recorded as an ordinary sense of the word. The dictionary lists it with verbs of rubbing and applying, and distinguishes ṣandal-i safed, white sandal, from ṣandal-i surkh, red.

In Avicenna’s Canon

Ibn Sina (Avicenna), the Persian physician whose Canon of Medicine was completed around 1025, gives sandal its own entry among the simple drugs. He writes in Arabic, in the framework of humoral medicine, where every substance is classed as hot or cold, wet or dry:

• Kinds. Yellow, red, and a whitish-yellow called maqāṣīrī, the most fragrant. Galen and Ibn Māsawayh are cited as rating the red most potent; other physicians, the white.
• Temperament. Cold and dry.
• Uses. It “dissolves hot swellings” and is “painted on” erysipelas, a skin inflammation; it is “useful in headache”; and the white kind is useful in “hot fevers”.

“Painted on” is the nearest the entry comes to describing a paste. It records what a physician recommended a thousand years ago, not evidence that it works; for the current evidence see sandalwood paste on skin.

The red sandal of these texts was most likely red sanders, Pterocarpus santalinus, which is not a true sandalwood. See telling real sandalwood from substitutes.

In the Parsi fire temple

Here sandalwood is not ground into paste but offered whole, as fuel. The fullest account is J. J. Modi’s description of Parsi ceremonies, published in Bombay in 1922.

The boi ceremony. At the start of each of the five watches (gāh) of the day, a priest feeds the sacred fire and recites the prayer to fire. Offerings are made with frankincense (loban) and sandalwood (sukhad).

The throne. The highest grade of fire, the Atash Behram, is spoken of as a king. It receives a māchī, or throne: six pieces of sandalwood laid on the fire in pairs. Lower-grade fires receive one or more pieces.

Sandalwood is preferred, not required. Modi is explicit: if sandalwood is not obtainable, “six pieces of any other kind of clean good wood will do”.

The Avestan connection is traditional. The Vendidad names four fragrant fuels for purifying a house. Modi notes that the first, urvāsna, “is generally taken to mean sandal-wood”. The French scholar Darmesteter, translating the same passage, glossed it as a garlic-like plant. The Parsi reading is a long tradition; it is not a settled translation.

In Iran

Iran’s own Zoroastrians present a different picture. Mary Boyce, who did fieldwork in the villages of the Yazd plain in 1963–64, describes the daily offering to the fire as dry wood and frankincense. At festivals the fire received a throne of six pieces of wood, the same form the Parsis build from sandalwood. Frankincense had to be bought in at rising cost. Her book does not mention sandalwood.

The same ritual form, made with sandalwood in India and with ordinary wood in Iran, suggests that the sandalwood offering is an Indian adaptation. No source we have found dates it, so treat that as an inference, not a fact.

What is not known

When sandalwood became the Parsi offering to the fire. Which Middle Persian texts use čandal, and how. Whether sandalwood paste, as opposed to the wood or its scent, had any ritual use in Iran itself. These are open questions, and this page will be updated if good evidence turns up.