Tiamat

Salt is the first thing. Before there was a sky to hold weather or ground to take a footprint, there were two waters lying against each other in the dark with no line drawn between them, and one of them was bitter. That was Tiamat. The other was Apsu, the sweet water underground, and where the two mixed they made children, and the children made more, until the quiet was gone for good.

Her name is not really a name. It is the ordinary Akkadian word for the sea, tâmtu, held in a grammatical form that functions like a shout across a room. Something close to “O sea!” She is not a goddess who governs the ocean from a throne at the bottom of it. She is the ocean, spoken to.

The trouble starts with noise. The young gods stamp and sing inside her, and Apsu cannot sleep, and he decides the simplest solution is to kill them. Tiamat refuses. She asks how they could destroy what they have made, and for a moment the oldest story in Babylon is about a mother arguing for her difficult children. It does not last. Ea hears the plot, works a spell that drops Apsu into a sleep from which nothing wakes him, strips off his crown and his aura and wears them, kills him, and builds his own house on top of the body. The fresh water is now a foundation. He calls the place Apsu and lives in it.

Pressed by the gods who lost by that killing, Tiamat changes her mind. What she does next is not a rage; it is procurement. She fills a nursery with weapons. She gives birth to serpents with sharp teeth and fills their bodies with poison in place of blood, then clothes them in a dread that makes them godlike to look at, and instructs them never to retreat. Eleven of them: the hydra, the great dragon, the hairy hero, the great demon, the savage dog, the scorpion-man, the storm demons, the fish-man, the bull-man. From among her own divine sons she picks Kingu, sets him on a throne as her new consort and commander, and fastens the Tablet of Destinies to his chest with the flat instruction that whatever he says will simply be true.

The gods send Ea against her, and he comes back. They send Anu, and he comes back. Then Marduk names his price, which is not gold. He wants the assembly to hand him permanent supremacy, his word decisive, his decrees unalterable, and they are frightened enough to give it.

He goes out with a bow, a mace, lightning, a net of his own making with the four winds tied at its corners so nothing can slip past, and seven storms he builds specially, among them the one the poem calls the Evil Wind. He spreads the net and she is inside it. Then he looses the wind into her face, and she opens her mouth to swallow it, and cannot close her lips again. The wind pours in. Her belly distends, her insides are forced apart, her jaw is held wide by the pressure of the thing she tried to eat. He shoots an arrow straight down her throat into the swollen belly, splits her open, and stands on the corpse.

The sea goddess is killed by wind.

What follows is butchery with a plan. He smashes her skull with the mace, cuts her arteries, and lets the north wind carry the blood away as news. Then he splits her lengthwise like a dried fish laid open for salting. One half he lifts and stretches overhead as the sky, and because the sky is her skin and there is still water on the other side of it, he posts a guard with a single order: do not let her waters escape. Her eyes become the springs of the Tigris and Euphrates. Her spittle becomes the drifting mist. He heaps the far mountains onto her breasts and bores wells through them so the springs run out, twists her tail into the great cosmic rope that binds the whole structure together, and props the heavens on her crotch. The eleven creatures are bound at his feet, their weapons broken, and their images are set up at the gate of the Apsu, where they stand as an advertisement. Kingu is bound, judged, and opened at the veins, and out of his blood Ea makes people, so that the gods can stop working.

The picture in most people’s heads at this point is a dragon, and that picture has no ancient warrant. The poem gives her a mouth and lips, a belly and entrails, breasts, a skull, arteries and, once, in a single line of Tablet V, a tail. Elsewhere she is simply a mass of water. No Mesopotamian image has ever been securely identified as her, and a whole string of proposed identifications on seals and reliefs has been rejected and now sits in the pile marked doubtful. The one clear picture of Tiamat being killed comes from the temple of Bel at Palmyra, where she appears with a woman’s body and legs made of snakes, and that carving is a late Hellenistic borrowing of the Babylonian motif rather than a window onto Babylon. The scales and the several heads arrived later still, from elsewhere.

Her power is the power of substrate. She cannot be diminished, only redistributed, which is why killing her makes a world instead of a hole. Everything the gods later stand on, drink from and navigate by is her, held in place. She can also breed: the eleven are made to specification, given venom for blood and terror for clothing, and they are formidable enough that two senior gods walk away from the fight rather than face them. The Tablet of Destinies she can simply give away, which means she holds authority over destiny before Marduk ever touches it.

Her limits are the limits of an ocean. She is enormous, undifferentiated and slow, and every one of Marduk’s weapons is designed for exactly that: a net, because you catch water in a net rather than stab it, and wind, because wind is the only thing that reliably moves a sea. She is also, in the poem, out-argued before she is out-fought, and her final mistake is an appetite. She opens to swallow, and what she swallows holds her open. After that she is only material. The guard is still up there, watching the seam in the sky, making sure she does not leak back through.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Tiamat in Mesopotamian mythology?

Tiamat is the personified salt sea and the mother of the first gods in Babylonian myth. Her name is the ordinary Akkadian word for the sea, tâmtu, in a form that reads almost as an address, “O sea!” She is known almost entirely from one text, the creation epic Enūma Eliš, with only a handful of references to her outside it.

How was Tiamat killed?

Marduk caught Tiamat in a net strung with the four winds, then drove a storm called the Evil Wind into her open mouth so she could not close her lips. The wind swelled her belly and held her jaw apart, and he shot an arrow down into her, split her open and stood on the corpse before smashing her skull with a mace.

What was created from Tiamat’s body?

Marduk split Tiamat lengthwise like a dried fish and made the world from the halves. One half became the sky, with a watchman posted to stop her waters escaping through it; her eyes became the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates, her spittle became mist, mountains were heaped on her breasts, and her tail was twisted into the cosmic rope that holds the structure together.

Was Tiamat really a dragon?

There is no ancient Mesopotamian evidence that Tiamat was pictured as a dragon. The epic describes her sometimes as a body of water and sometimes as a figure with a mouth, belly, breasts and, in one line, a tail, and no Mesopotamian image has ever been positively identified as her. The best-known depiction of her death comes from the temple of Bel at Palmyra and is a late Hellenistic version of the motif.

What monsters did Tiamat create?

Tiamat produced eleven creatures to fight the younger gods, giving them poison instead of blood and an aura of dread. The group included the hydra, the great dragon, the hairy hero, the great demon, the savage dog, the scorpion-man, storm demons, the fish-man and the bull-man, and after her defeat Marduk bound them and set up their images at the gate of the Apsu.

Related Entries

Marduk, Kingu, Enki, Anu (Mesopotamian), Enlil, Mushhushshu, Girtablilu, Gud-elim, Fish-man, Anzû, Ninurta, Labbu, Lotan, Leviathan, Typhon, Ymir