Umay is the Turkic mother-goddess presiding over the womb, childbirth, and the protection of infants, her name being the Old Turkic word for the placenta. Named beside Tengri in the eighth-century Orkhon inscriptions and paired with him as his female counterpart, she persisted across the Islamic centuries in Central Asian domestic ritual, where she guards mothers and the newborn through the vulnerable first forty days. In the Uzbek sphere her cult is largely submerged beneath Islamic patron-figures, yet ethnographers record her as an underlying protective power set against the child-stealing demoness Albasti.