Umai is the great mother-goddess of the Turkic peoples, whose name means the womb and afterbirth and who therefore rules over conception, birth and the tender first years of life. She attends every cradle and every woman in labor, warding the newborn's fragile soul; a sleeping baby's smile is her caress, and its startled cry her momentary departure. Named beside Tengri in the eighth-century inscriptions, where a queen's dignity is measured by likeness to her, she endured in Kazakh usage as Umai-ana, invoked by mothers and by the baksy who drive off the child-stealing Albasty in her name. She forms with the sky-father Tengri and the sacred Earth-Water a triad of protecting powers, the maternal earthward pole of a cosmos crowned by heaven.