Tengiri is the supreme sky-god of the pre-Islamic Kumyks, the Kipchak-Turkic form of the pan-Turkic celestial deity Tengri. Ethnographers record that the early Kumyk tribes venerated Tengiri together with the divinities and spirits of the sun, the moon, the earth and the water, Tengiri presiding over this loose pantheon as lord of the heavens. With the spread of Sunni Islam between the eighth and twelfth centuries his cult receded, surviving mainly in the divine name, in oath formulae and in scattered folk phrases; scholars treat him as the highest stratum of the older Turkic layer of Kumyk religion.