Yanbirde, whose name means 'the giver of soul', is the primordial father who opens the Ural-batyr epic. He and his wife Yanbike dwell alone in a time before nations, subsisting by the hunt and keeping company with tamed beasts. Their two sons, the good Ural and the wayward Shulgen, are the first heroes, and the couple's rule that none may taste blood becomes the moral fault-line of the whole poem. As the earliest human ancestor, Yanbirde stands at the root of the Bashkir mythic genealogy.