Tsalla (recorded as Zalla) was the supreme deity of the Akusha Dargins, a sky- and thunder-god whose name derives from the Dargin word for fire and is read by ethnographers as 'Holder of Fire'. The theonym was set down in the 1770s by the naturalist Güldenstädt, and later scholarship groups him with the thunder-gods who stood at the head of the several Daghestani highland pantheons before Islamization. Lightning was understood as his weapon, an axe of fire flung from the heavens; a lightning strike was interpreted as a deliberate divine act. With the spread of Sunni Islam from the fourteenth century onward the cult faded, surviving chiefly in weather rites, in sayings about the fire-axe, and in the etymology of the god's own name.