Bobo-i Dehqon ('Grandfather Farmer'), the Central Asian patron of agriculture known across the Tajik-speaking world as Bābā-ye Dehqān, is revered in the Yaghnob valley as the first man and first tiller, who received the plough and passed the craft of cultivation to humankind through an unbroken chain of successors. He is imagined as the soul of the earth that enters the field at the spring sowing and departs at the harvest, and folk tradition merges him variously with Adam, the first prophet, and with the deathless Khizr. At the vernal opening of the agricultural year a village elder acting as Bobo-i Dehqon drove the first furrow and cast the first seed before any household might begin its own work. A threshing scene on a seventh- to eighth-century mural at Panjikent, in the Sogdian homeland from which the Yaghnobis descend, has been read as the earliest testimony to his cult. Sources differ on whether he is best understood as a deified ancestor, a personification of the tilled earth, or an Islamized reflex of an older Iranian fertility figure.