In Mesopotamian religion, Tiamat (Akkadian: {{cuneiform| or, Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: Θαλάττη|Thaláttē)[1] is the primordial sea, mating with Abzû (Apsu), the groundwater, to produce the gods in the Babylonian epic Enûma Elish, which translates as "when on high." She is referred to as a woman, and has—at various points in the epic— a number of anthropomorphic features (such as breasts) and theriomorphic features (such as a tail).
In the Enûma Elish, the Babylonian epic of creation, Tiamat bears the first generation of deities after mingling her waters with those of Apsu, her consort. The gods continue to reproduce, forming a noisy new mass of divine children. Apsu, driven to violence by the noise they make, seeks to destroy them and is killed. Enraged, Tiamat also wars upon those of her own and Apsu's children who killed her consort, bringing forth a series of monsters as weapons. She also takes a new consort, Qingu, and bestows on him the Tablet of Destinies, which represents legitimate divine rulership.[2] [3] She is ultimately defeated and slain by Enki's son, the storm-god Marduk, but not before she conjures forth monsters whose bodies she fills with "poison instead of blood." Marduk dismembers her, and then constructs and structures elements of the cosmos from Tiamat’s body.
Some sources have dubiously identified her with images of a sea serpent or dragon.
Thorkild Jacobsen and Walter Burkert both argue for a connection with the Akkadian word for sea, tâmtu, following an early form, ti'amtum.[4] Burkert continues by making a linguistic connection to Tethys. The later form Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: Θαλάττη|translit=thaláttē|label=none, which appears in the Hellenistic Babylonian writer Berossus' first volume of universal history, is clearly related to Greek, an Eastern variant of . It is thought that the proper name ti'amat, which is the vocative or construct form, was dropped in secondary translations of the original texts, because some Akkadian copyists of Enuma Elish substituted the ordinary word tāmtu ('sea') for Tiamat, the two names having become essentially the same due to association. Tiamat also has been claimed to be cognate with the Northwest Semitic word tehom (תְּהוֹם; 'the deeps, abyss'), in the Book of Genesis 1:2.[5]
The Babylonian epic Enuma Elish is named for its incipit: "When on high [or: When above]," the heavens did not yet exist nor the earth below, Abzu the subterranean ocean was there, "the first, the begetter", and Tiamat, the overground sea, "she who bore them all"; they were "mixing their waters". It is thought that female deities are older than male ones in Mesopotamia, and Tiamat may have begun as part of the cult of Nammu, a female principle of a watery creative force, with equally strong connections to the underworld, which predates the appearance of Ea-Enki.[6]
Harriet Crawford finds this "mixing of the waters" to be a natural feature of the middle Persian Gulf, where fresh waters from the Arabian aquifer mix and mingle with the salt waters of the sea.[7] This characteristic is especially true of the region of Bahrain, whose name in Arabic means "two seas", and which is thought to be the site of Dilmun, the original site of the Sumerian creation beliefs.[8] The difference in density of salt and fresh water drives a perceptible separation.
In the Enuma Elish, Tiamat’s physical description includes a tail, a thigh, "lower parts" (which shake together), a belly, an udder, ribs, a neck, a head, a skull, eyes, nostrils, a mouth, and lips. She has insides (possibly "entrails"), a heart, arteries, and blood.
Tiamat was once regarded as a sea serpent or dragon, although Assyriologist Alexander Heidel has previously recognized that a "dragon form can not be imputed to Tiamat with certainty." She is still often referred to as a monster, though this identification has been credibly challenged.[9] In Enuma Elish, Tiamat is clearly portrayed as a mother of monsters but, before this, she is just as clearly portrayed as a mother to all the gods.
With Tiamat, Abzu (or Apsû) fathered the elder deities Lahmu and Lahamu (masc. the 'hairy'), a title given to the gatekeepers at Enki's Abzu/E'engurra-temple in Eridu. Lahmu and Lahamu, in turn, were the parents of the 'ends' of the heavens (Anshar, from an-šar, 'heaven-totality/end') and the earth (Kishar); Anshar and Kishar were considered to meet at the horizon, becoming, thereby, the parents of Anu (Heaven) and Ki (Earth).
Tiamat was the "shining" personification of the sea who roared and smote in the chaos of original creation. She and Abzu filled the cosmic abyss with the primeval waters. She is "Ummu-Hubur who formed all things."
In the myth recorded on cuneiform tablets, the deity Enki (later Ea) believed correctly that Abzu was planning to murder the younger deities as a consequence of his aggravation with the noisy tumult they created. This premonition led Enki to capture Abzu and hold him prisoner beneath Abzu’s own temple, the E-Abzu ('temple of Abzu'). This angered Kingu, their son, who reported the event to Tiamat, whereupon she fashioned eleven monsters to battle the deities in order to avenge Abzu's death. These were her own offspring: Bašmu ('Venomous Snake'), Ušumgallu ('Great Dragon'), Mušmaḫḫū ('Exalted Serpent'), Mušḫuššu ('Furious Snake'), Laḫmu (the 'Hairy One'), Ugallu (the 'Big Weather-Beast'), Uridimmu ('Mad Lion'), Girtablullû ('Scorpion-Man'), Umū dabrūtu ('Violent Storms'), Kulullû ('Fish-Man'), and Kusarikku ('Bull-Man').
Tiamat was in possession of the Tablet of Destinies, and in the primordial battle, she gave the relic to Kingu, the deity she had chosen as her lover and the leader of her host, and who was also one of her children. The terrified deities were rescued by Anu, who secured their promise to revere him as "king of the gods." He fought Tiamat with the arrows of the winds, a net, a club, and an invincible spear. Anu was later replaced first by Enlil, and (in the late version that has survived after the First Dynasty of Babylon) then subsequently by Marduk, the son of Ea.
Slicing Tiamat in half, Marduk made from her ribs the vault of heaven and earth. Her weeping eyes became the sources of the Tigris and the Euphrates, her tail became the Milky Way.[10] With the approval of the elder deities, he took the Tablet of Destinies from Kingu, and installed himself as the head of the Babylonian pantheon. Kingu was captured and later was slain: his red blood mixed with the red clay of the Earth would make the body of humankind, created to act as the servant of the younger Igigi deities.
The principal theme of the epic is the rightful elevation of Marduk to command over all the deities. “It has long been realized that the Marduk epic, for all its local coloring and probable elaboration by the Babylonian theologians, reflects in substance older Sumerian material,” American Assyriologist E. A. Speiser remarked in 1942,[11] adding, “The exact Sumerian prototype, however, has not turned up so far.” However, this surmise that the Babylonian version of the story is based upon a modified version of an older epic, in which Enlil, not Marduk, was the god who slew Tiamat,[12] has been more recently dismissed as "distinctly improbable."[13]
One example of an icon that was more so a motif of Tiamat was within the Temple of Bêl, located in Palmyra. The motif depicts Nabu and Marduk defeating Tiamat. In this picture, Tiamat is shown as a woman's body with legs which are made of snakes.[14]
It was once thought that the myth of Tiamat was one of the earliest recorded versions of a Chaoskampf, a mythological motif that generally involves the battle between a culture hero and a chthonic or aquatic monster, serpent, or dragon. Chaoskampf motifs in other mythologies perhaps linked to the Tiamat myth include: the Hittite Illuyanka myth; the Greek lore of Apollo's killing of the Python as a necessary action to take over the Delphic Oracle;[15] and to Genesis in the Hebrew Bible.[16]
A number of writers have put forth ideas about Tiamat: Robert Graves,[17] for example, considered Tiamat's death by Marduk as evidence for his hypothesis of an ancient shift in power from a matriarchal society to a patriarchy. The theory suggested that Tiamat and other ancient monster figures were depictions of former supreme deities of peaceful, woman-centered religions. Their defeat at the hands of a male hero corresponded to the overthrow of these matristic religions and societies by male-dominated ones.
The depiction of Tiamat as a multi-headed dragon was popularized in the 1970s as a fixture of Dungeons & Dragons, a role-playing game inspired by earlier sources that associated Tiamat with later mythological characters, such as Lotan (Leviathan).[18]
In the Monsterverse, an unseen monster is designated as "Titanus Tiamat" in Godzilla: King of the Monsters. Tiamat fully appears as an aquatic serpentine dragon in the Godzilla vs Kong prequel graphic novel Godzilla Dominion before making her live action debut in . [19] She served as a minor antagonist in both, conflicting with Godzilla over territory.
In the online multiplayer game League of Legends, players can purchase an item called “Tiamat,” which the player can optionally upgrade into the items “Profane Hydra,” “Ravenous Hydra,” and “Titanic Hydra.” This follows the iconography of Tiamat being represented as an aquatic monster with serpentine qualities.