Bobo Dehqon, the 'Forefather Farmer', is the patron of cultivation among the Pamiri peoples and the wider Tajik agrarian world. He is remembered as the first human being and the first tiller, frequently merged with Adam, who received the knowledge of farming and passed it down through an unbroken chain of successors. At the opening of spring ploughing, called Shogun or Shawgun in Badakhshan and timed to the Nowruz season, a respected elder acting in his person drives a pair of adorned oxen to cut the first furrows and scatter the first seed, after which the rest of the community may sow. The rite fuses an apocryphal Islamic creation account with an older Iranian mythology of origins, and it preserves the veneration of the fertile earth beneath a saintly name.