The santur is a Persian hammered dulcimer

Hammered dulcimer

The hammered dulcimer is a stringed musical instrument with the strings stretched over a trapezoidal sounding board. Typically, the hammered dulcimer is set on a stand, at an angle, before the musician, who holds small mallet hammers in each hand to strike the strings...

It is a trapezoid

Trapezoid

In Euclidean geometry, a convex quadrilateral with one pair of parallel sides is referred to as a trapezoid in American English and as a trapezium in English outside North America. A trapezoid with vertices ABCD is denoted...

-shaped box often made of walnut

Walnut

Juglans is a plant genus of the family Juglandaceae, the seeds of which are known as walnuts. They are deciduous trees, 10–40 meters tall , with pinnate leaves 200–900 millimetres long , with 5–25 leaflets; the shoots have chambered pith, a character shared with the wingnuts , but not the hickories...

 or different exotic woods. The Persian classical santur has 72 strings. The name santur was first referenced in ancient Persian poetry. To date there has never been verifiable evidence what this name actually means, it is just a name and the only meaning it has in the Persian language is this instrument. The oval-shaped Mezrabs (mallets) are feather-weight and are held between the thumb, index and middle fingers.