σινδών
sindṓn
Greek from Semitic
“Medieval knights wore sendal beneath their armor — a silk so fine that its name traces back to the Indus River civilization.”
Greek sindṓn (σινδών) meant a fine linen or muslin cloth, and the word likely came from Sindh, the region of the Indus Valley (modern Pakistan) where such textiles originated. The connection between the fabric and the place is ancient: Herodotus mentioned sindones as Indian cotton cloth in the 400s BCE. The Romans borrowed the word as sindon for a fine wrap or shroud — the Shroud of Turin is still called the Sacra Sindone in Italian.
As the word passed through Late Latin and into Old French, it became cendal or sendal and narrowed its meaning from any fine cloth to a specific type of thin silk taffeta. Crusader chronicles are full of sendal. Knights lined their helmets with it. Ladies wore it as veils. Banners of sendal snapped from castle towers. The silk came from the eastern Mediterranean — Byzantine workshops, or further east from Persia and China.
In England, sendal appears in inventories and romances from the 1200s through the 1400s. Chaucer mentions it. So do the Arthurian romances. Sir Lancelot's pavilion is hung with sendal in multiple retellings. The fabric was expensive enough to signal wealth but common enough to appear in any noble household. It was the everyday luxury silk of the medieval world.
Sendal disappeared from English by the 1600s, replaced by newer silk trade names like taffeta and satin. The word is extinct in modern usage. But its journey — from the Indus Valley to Herodotus to the Crusades to Chaucer — maps the entire history of the East-to-West textile trade in a single term.
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Today
Every medieval romance that drapes its heroes in sendal is preserving a trade route. The word names a fabric from the Indus, filtered through Greek merchants, Roman shroud-makers, Byzantine silk workshops, and Crusader tailors. By the time Chaucer used it, the word had already crossed three thousand years and five thousand miles.
"The past is never dead. It's not even past." — William Faulkner, 1951. Sendal is a dead word for a dead fabric, but the trade network it names — East to West, silk for silver, luxury for longing — has never stopped operating. We just call the fabrics by different names now.
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