Dunlop Synthetic Gut 17g Tennis String Set
About Zaranj
This desert city is the capital of Nimruz Province, set near the Iranian border on the old Sistan basin rather than on a large permanent river. Its main crossing to Milak makes it one of Afghanistan’s principal western border points, and the Delaram-Zaranj highway links it to the national road network.
THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW
Dunlop Synthetic Gut in 17 gauge, supplied as a single set — 40 feet, one racquet, nothing wasted.
Synthetic gut is the all-round nylon string: a solid centre core inside wear-resistant outer wraps. The solid core is what gives the same true response at the hundredth strike as at the first, and the wraps carry the abrasion where the mains cross the crosses.
The formula does not change between gauges. The diameter does, and the diameter is what the hand feels.
At 1.25 mm, 17 gauge is the thinner of the two common sizes. A thinner string wraps further around the ball at contact and slides more freely across the crosses, so it returns more feel and more spin than the same string at 16 gauge; it also has less material to give up to wear, so the bed has a shorter working life.
That is the whole trade.
Zaranj sits in the Sistan basin of southwestern Afghanistan, one of the driest and windiest places in the region, where a summer wind runs for months and carries sand with it.
Abrasive grit shortens the life of any string bed, and shortest of all a thin one — which is why a single set is a routine replacement there rather than an occasional one.
Specifications
| Type | Synthetic gut, solid nylon core |
|---|---|
| Construction | Solid core with wear-resistant outer wraps |
| Gauge | 17 / 1.25 mm |
| Set length | 40 ft / approx. 12 m |
| Covers | One racquet |
| Characteristics | Feel and spin ahead of durability |
| Best for | Club players who value touch over string life |
| Brand | Dunlop |
A set is the honest unit for a player who restrings a handful of times a year; the reel exists for everyone doing it weekly.
LET Dunlop Synthetic Gut 17g Tennis String Set SHOW YOU Zaranj
String: Dunlop Synthetic Gut 17g Tennis Strings Set: File this one under unresolved, cross-referenced to everything. The Sorkh Dagh: solid mud brick, over thirty metres above the Sistan plain, one of the great enigmatic monuments of eastern Iran and Central Asia, and nobody has closed the record on it. Ghirshman dug here in 1936. Dales returned in 1968 and put a tunnel through the mass, which is one way to annotate a monument. The finds were entered under early first millennium BC and Achaemenid; later hands argue the core is Bronze Age, third millennium. Leading candidate for the capital region of Drangiana. Provenance: contested, beautifully.
String: Dunlop Synthetic Gut 17g Tennis Strings Set: Now this is a holding. Right bank of the Helmand, south of Zaranj, Chahar Burjak district, among the most extensive ruin fields in all of Sistan: a great square walled city, scores of round towers, some still standing ten metres, citadel mounds and outworks along the river bluffs. It flourished in the medieval Islamic centuries, when irrigated Sistan carried dense settlement, then served as stronghold and capital to the local maliks after the Timurid catastrophe. Tradition assigns the ruin to Timur's armies and the breakdown of the Helmand works. The sand is deaccessioning it, slowly, without asking.
String: Dunlop Synthetic Gut 17g Tennis Strings Set: Catalogued twice, which ruins an index: Ram Shahristan, also recorded as Abrashahriyar, the ancient capital of Sistan before Zaranj itself. The medieval Arab geographers preserve the whole sequence. A great canal off the Helmand. A dam that broke. A canal that failed, fields and cisterns dry, the population abandoning the city and marching three days across the plain to found a new capital at Zaranj. The same entry recurs across centuries in this delta, every city living and dying by its dams. The remains lie out in the basin, unnumbered, among the ruin mounds ringing the modern city.
String: Dunlop Synthetic Gut 17g Tennis Strings Set: The primary source. Everything else in Sistan is a copy of it. Afghanistan's longest river dies here into the wetlands of the depression, and for three thousand years that water made this a granary of empires: the Achaemenids held it as Drangiana, and in the ninth century AD a coppersmith's son, Yaqub ibn al-Layth al-Saffar, rose out of Zaranj to build the Saffarid empire and challenge the caliphate itself, a deed the city still cites. Generations of canals stripe the plain; their destruction, completed in Timur's era, returned much of the delta to desert.
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