The Names of Sandalwood
This piece appeared on my Patreon account way back in 2022. I thought I’d move it here so that it would be more accessible.
The timbers of at least two distinct tree species were referred to as ‘sandalwood’ (or some variant of this name) during the Middle Ages: Santalum album, or white sandalwood, much of which appears to have come originally from the island of Timor; and Pterocarpus santalinus, or red sandalwood, which had a wider, and much more westerly, distribution. A number of other species in the genus Santalum are also known today as ‘sandalwood’, but most of these are endemic to various islands in the Pacific Ocean and were not traded across Afro-Eurasia in the Middle Ages. If we’re talking medieval sandalwood, we’re talking Santalum album and Pterocarpus santalinus.
Why were these two woods given the same name? I’m not sure, and I don’t think anyone else is either. The two woods are different in colour, origin, and scent. In his classic book, Between East and West (2003:110–111), the Cambridge geographer R. A. Donkin says that the wood of another Indonesian tree species in the genus Pterocarpus, P. indicus, smells a lot like white sandalwood, and that the similarities between P. indicus and P. santalinus led to all three receiving the ‘sandalwood’ designation.
Candana
Anyway: The source of most of the names for sandalwood (both kinds) in the world’s languages, including English ‘sandalwood’, is the Sanskrit word candana. This word may have come from a Dravidian language of South India, although it is sometimes claimed that it has some sort relationship with the word candra (‘glittering, incandescent; the moon’) instead, because in India white sandalwood is burned as incense for religious purposes — in which case it would be related, distantly, to the English word ‘candle’.
Regardless of where it came from, the word candana wandered widely across the medieval world. Its reflexes may be found in Chinese, Malay, Old Javanese, Persian, Arabic, Middle Dutch, Old French, and many other languages. By the middle of the first millennium CE/AD, candana had entered Middle Persian and become čandal (Figure 1). This is the form of the word that ended up being borrowed by Arabic speakers and thus also the form that made its way further west.
Arabic doesn’t have a phoneme corresponding to Sanskrit c or Middle Persian č (/t͡ʃ/, like the ‘ch’ in ‘church’), so the word acquired an emphatic /sˤ/ and became ṣandal (صندل). This form was then loaned into Greek as σάνταλον, as I noted in an older post on the Medieval Indonesia blog. From Greek it entered Latin, and from either Greek or Latin it made its way into all the recorded languages of medieval Europe (whence Old French sandres, Middle Dutch sandel(boem), Old East Slavic сандалъ, and so on).
Close Relatives
Although white sandalwood (S. album) is native to the Indo-Malaysian archipelago, the names it usually possesses there, at least in the pre-modern historical record, are loanwords. Malay, Old Javanese, and Old Sundanese all use essentially the same word as the Sanskrit: cendana in modern Malay/Indonesian, candana in the other two. There are a lot of Sanskrit loanwords in the archipelago’s languages, and other commodities of Indo-Malaysian origin sometimes have Sanskrit-derived names in local languages, so this isn’t so surprising.
Interestingly, however, the Sanskrit word also made its way as far as Egypt and China in more or less its original guise. The sixth-century Alexandrian traveller Kosmas Indikopleustes (Κοσμᾶς Ἰνδικοπλεύστης), describing the commodities available for sale in Sri Lanka in his Christian Topography (c.550), uses the term τζανδάναν for ‘sandalwood’ — a precise transliteration of the Sanskrit candana, not the usual Perso-Arabic-derived Greek form σάνταλον (Figure 2):
The Chinese word for ‘(white) sandalwood’, zhāntán (栴檀 or 旃檀), is also recognisably related to candana. It is lacking the final vowel -a, though, which suggests that it came from a later, Middle Indo-Aryan/’Prakrit’, form rather than Sanskrit candana. Sanskrit’s final vowels, particularly -a, tended to disappear in later Indic languages, such that Rāma, the avatar of Viṣṇu and hero of the Rāmāyaṇa, is known to Hindi speakers simply as Rām (राम), and such that candan is the Hindi name for white sandalwood. The absence of the vowel at the end of the word zhāntán suggests that it was borrowed from a Middle Indo-Aryan vernacular rather than from Sanskrit itself (although Chinese historical phonology is complex and loanwords are seldom rendered accurately in Sinitic languages).
Anyway, here’s an early appearance of that word, 旃檀, in a poem by Táng-dynasty writer Mèng Hàorán (孟浩然, 689–740) called ‘A Visit to Cloud Gate Temple’ (遊雲門寺), here translated by Paul Kroll (2021:40–41):
我行適諸越
夢寐懷所歡
久負獨往願
今來恣遊盤
台嶺踐嶝石
耶溪溯林湍
捨舟入香界
登閣憩旃檀
[…]
‘My travels have brought me now to Yue,
Where even in dream I recall those dear to me.
Long I have borne the wish to fare on my own;
At the present day I can range and roam off at will.
On a ridge of Tiantai I trod upon stepping stones;
At Ruoye Stream went against the swift current by a grove.
Leaving the boat behind, I entered a realm of incense;
After climbing a pavilion, rested amidst candana…’
Although Kosmas’s word for ‘sandalwood’ didn’t end up having common currency in western Afro-Eurasia, it does at least appear in the manuscripts of his work, meaning that the Sanskrit word was recorded in essentially the same form from China through Java and India to Egypt. If you had said ‘τζανδάναν’ or ‘旃檀’ to someone in fourteenth-century Sumatra or Bengal, there’s a good chance they would have known what you meant. I can’t think of many other words like this.
Red vs White
The most common way of distinguishing the names of the two sandalwoods was by colour — typically red and white, although white was sometimes also distinguished from yellow. Writing in the late sixteenth century, the Dutch explorer Jan Huyghen van Linschoten said that both white and yellow sandalwood came from Timor, suggesting that these were merely different varietals of S. album.
In Sanskrit, candana usually meant the white kind; the red sort was distinguished as rakta candana ‘red candana’. In Old Javanese, though, red sandalwood was known as candana jěṅgi. Jěṅgi was the Old Javanese name for East Africa; it is related to the Persian word Zangi (زنگی) ‘African person, black person’ and the Arabic Zanj (زنج) ‘East Africa’, although it’s not clear precisely how. It’s also not clear to me why red sandalwood was distinguished as ‘East African sandalwood’, although the adjective jěṅgi (Old Sundanese jenggi, Malay janggi/jenggi) has sometimes been applied to things from other parts of the Indian Ocean, including poh/pauh jenggi, literally ‘East African mango’, a name for the enormous floating seeds of the coco de mer (Lodoicea maldivica), a palm from the Seychelles.
In any case, the thirteenth-century Flemish poet Jacob van Maerlant distinguished three kinds of sandalwood, namely ‘white, blue, and red’ (wit blau eñ roet), in his Der naturen bloeme (‘the flower of nature’) (Figure 3), supposedly following Matthaeus Platearius’s Liber de simplici medicina (more often known as Circa instans, after its first two words). Precisely what ‘blue sandalwood’ was I’m not sure, and I don’t think either van Maerlant or Platearius offer any clues.
It’s interesting, anyway, that white sandalwood was explicitly distinguished in texts from medieval Europe. The situation is rather different from that of cloves or nutmeg, which can be identified reasonably easily and decisively in medieval texts in a range of different languages and which came from specific and well-known islands in what is now eastern Indonesia. If we come across a word for ‘clove’, most of the time we know we’re dealing with dried flower buds from one of five islands near Halmahera; if we come across a word for ‘sandalwood’, we could be dealing with one of at least two species which grew in disparate parts of the planet.
Still, the diffusion of words for sandalwood throughout medieval Afro-Eurasia highlights links of a different kind. As with most things that traversed the Eastern Hemisphere before the sixteenth century, the words for sandalwood were transferred from place to place in a kind of relay from one language to another neighbouring language, the word accompanying knowledge about the scent and supposed medicinal properties of the wood, with direct contacts between separate corners of the Afro-Eurasian supercontinent established only fleetingly.
A. J. West — Leiden 2022 (posted here 2024).
References
Anklesaria, Tahmuras Dinshaji. 1908. The Bûndahishn. Bombay: British India Press, Byculla.
Donkin, R. A. 2003. Between east and west. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society.
Kroll, Paul W. 2021. The poetry of Meng Haoran. Library of Chinese Humanities. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter.
MacKenzie, D. N. 1971. A concise Pahlavi dictionary. London: Oxford University Press.
