Bobo-i Dehqon, the 'Ancestral Farmer', is the patron of cultivation among the Tajiks, imagined as the first man to yoke oxen and open the soil. He presides over the ritual calendar of tillage: the first furrow of spring, sowing, and the guarding of the ripening crop are undertaken with invocations to him, and a full harvest is credited to his favour. Ethnographers of the mountain and plains Tajiks record him as an agrarian ancestor-spirit whose cult preserves elements of a pre-Islamic patron of the field and the seed beneath a veneer of Muslim veneration of forefathers.