The name Kūhbanān means "pistachio-tree mountain", from the Persian words kūh, meaning "mountain", and banān, which refers to the wild pistachio.^[7]

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]