On the Iranian landscape today, a mountain is generally referred to as a kuh (Persian), dagh (Turkic) and, to a much lesser extent, jabal (Arabic).

Another Kyanian king, Gashtasp, built the temple Azar Barzin Mehr at Navand, a mountain in the northwest of present-day Sabzevar in Kohrassan.

The Greek historian Herodotus (d. 425 BCE) noted that the Persians’ “wont ... is to ascend the summits of the loftiest mountains, and there to offer sacrifice to [Ahuramazda] which is the name they give to the whole circuit of firmament”.

[4] Spirituality aside, in a practical sense, the snow-capped mountains were the source of water, they afforded protection, and dominated the plains, roads and settlements below, and served as watchtowers.

The Arabicized form of gar was jar and, according to Ibn Isfandiyar (c. 1226), this latter term, in the Tabari tongue of northern Iran, had come to mean a mountain that bore trees and bushes and on which one could farm.

According to Seyyed Zahir al-Din Mar'ashi, a 15th-century Persian historian, in 838-839 AD the lieutenant of the Abbasid Caliphate in Tabarestan delegated the governorship of Kuhestan, land of many mountains, bordering Khorassan, to one called Bandar.

Because the reference to this individual contained no eponymous designation one may conclude that Bandar [read: Band+dar, like Ostan+dar or Vand+dar] was a title or office, and it would have been an apt one for one destined to govern a mountainous region.

Its popular and familiar usage as “dam” is obvious in Band-e Amir near Shiraz and its meaning as “obstacle or road block” is evident in the word rah-bandan.

According to Hyacinth Louis Rabino (Mazandaran and Astarabad, 1924), the Langa region of Tankabon district was divided into Jurband (or Balaband, upper-band) and Jirband (Zir-band/Payin-band, lower-band) and the low wooded hills that separated the plain from the summer camps were known as Miyanband (middle-band).

[6] By the 9th century fand had begun to replace band in Iranian place-names: As recorded by Yahya bin Jaber al-Baladhuri (d. 892), for example, Ashband, a district near Naishahpur, in Khorassan became Ashfand.

Among less than a handful of contemporary fand-bearing toponyms in Iran, Fandoglu near Miyaneh in Azarbaijan and Fandokht near Birjand in Kohrassan are mountainy places, too, as are Fand in the Damavand region, and Fenderesk northeast of Gorgan.

It is not clear exactly when fand or fend entered the nomenclature of place-names in north-central Iran other than it would have been associated with Islamic conquest of Mazandaran and the ensuing 8th century migrations by descendants of Muhammad from Hejaz, Syria and Iraq into areas of present-day northern Iran such as Amol, Babol (formerly Barforush, earlier Mamtir) and Babolsar (formerly Mashadsar), Qaemshahr (formerly Shahi, earlier Aliababd), Sari and Gorgan (formerly Astarabad, presently Golestan).

In their vernacular the new arrivals devised fanderiyya or fenderiyya, in which fand substituted for the local ostan and this became the name of a place that Rabino identified as Fender-i Namavar [Persian: ﺮﻮﺎﻤﻧ ﻯﺮﺩﻧﻔ], a rural district located at the foot of the mountains nineteen miles of Babol and eight five miles south-southwest of Aliabad (later, Shahi, presently Qaemshahr) in the Bala Taijan area, which is shown in a 1720 Dutch map Nova Persiae (Amsterdam: R & I Ottens, 1720) as Panderis.

Among the siyyids who emigrated to the Amol region, the Mar’ashis were one group that stood out as the probable originator of the term fanderiyya or fenderiyya.

According to Abulfeda, this was an important place in Sham: It was a citadel located on the southern bank of the Djaihan River east of Tell Hamoun, southeast of Ain Zarbah, and west of the Marra defile, one of the passes into the Almanus Mountains.

In light of its geographical description and a 10th-century map of Sham in Ashkal al-Alam by Abulqasem bin Ahmad Jaihani (F. Mansouri edition, 1989–90), the place would have been in the northwest corner of present-day Syria known as Kordagh (Kord Mountain), northeast of Mar’ash.

By 1359, the Mar’ashi were sufficiently in favor among the Amol population that they rose against the established local order and assumed control of the region.

In a battle fought at Tamisheh (probably Behshahr) east of Sari and on the border of Gorgan, the Mar’ashi chief overcame his rival and sent him scurrying eastward into the mountains (kuhsarat) and farther into Khorassan.

One particular and rare form of it was reskat and an example of it appeared in the place-name Bala–reskat [ﺖﻛﺳﺮﻻﺎﺑ], upper village, in northern Shahi, where a domed brick-structure supported an inscription dating to 1009.

It is equally likely that when the migrants from Fenderi reached the Gorgan region their abode came to be known as Fenderiasak or Fenderasak or, as the lexicologist F. Steingass's Persian-English Dictionary (1892) noted, Fandarsag.

The earliest evidence of Fenderesk as a toponym appeared in the form of a nisba (relational) for one Khajeh Ahmad Fendereski, who was ruling Astarabad in 1508-09.

In a firman (edict) dated August 1591, Shah Abbas I the Great confirmed the land grant of Fenderesk, Ramiyan and Abr to Mirza Beik Fendereski (d. 1601).