Umay is used in Central Asian and Persianate tradition and is linked with auspicious feminine protection.
Umay is among the oldest named deities in the Turkic and Mongolian world, a goddess whose worship predates recorded history in the Central Asian steppes. In the ancient Tengrist religion practiced by nomadic peoples from the Altai mountains to the Siberian taiga, Umay Ana ('Mother Umay') was the divine protector of children, women in childbirth, and the fertility of the earth.
She was depicted with golden wings and was said to descend from the sky to guard the souls of newborns during their vulnerable first days of life — her name itself possibly deriving from the proto-Turkic root for 'placenta' or 'womb,' the sacred vessel of beginning. The name appears in the 8th-century Orkhon inscriptions — among the oldest surviving written records in any Turkic language — where Umay is mentioned alongside Tengri (the sky god) and the holy earth as one of the three great powers sustaining human life. For the Göktürk khagans who carved those stone monuments on the Mongolian steppe, invoking Umay was not metaphor but cosmology.
The name continued to be used in Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Uzbek communities throughout the medieval and early modern periods, surviving the transitions from Tengrism to Islam by shedding its explicitly divine connotations while retaining its aura of protection. Today, Umay is experiencing a quiet revival across Central Asia and among Turkic diaspora communities in Europe and North America, valued both for its cultural specificity and its international accessibility — just five letters, easy to pronounce in dozens of languages, yet carrying an unbroken thread back to the cradle of the Eurasian nomadic world.