Tiamat

Tiamat is the primordial salt-water sea goddess of the Babylonian creation epic Enūma Eliš, who raised an army of monsters against the gods and was split in two by Marduk to make heaven and earth.

The Story

The Enūma Eliš, named for its opening words, "When on high," begins before heaven and earth had names. Only two waters existed: Apsu, the fresh water, and Tiamat, the salt sea. Their waters mingled, and the first gods were born inside them.

The young gods were noisy, and Apsu decided to destroy them so he could rest. Tiamat at first objected, but the wise god Ea discovered the plan and killed Apsu. Urged on by other gods, Tiamat then prepared for war. She gave birth to eleven kinds of monsters, among them giant serpents filled with venom instead of blood, the horned mušḫuššu dragon, lion-demons, scorpion-men, and fish-men. She raised the god Kingu to command them and fastened the Tablet of Destinies to his chest.

The terrified gods turned to Marduk, the young god of Babylon, who agreed to fight if they made him king. Armed with a bow, a net, and the winds, he met Tiamat in single combat. When she opened her mouth to swallow him, he drove an evil wind inside her, then shot an arrow that split her belly and pierced her heart. He cut her body in two like a dried fish, raising half to make the sky and laying out the other half as the earth. From her eyes flowed the Tigris and Euphrates.

Appearance and Powers

The epic never clearly describes Tiamat's body. It mentions her mouth, belly, heart, eyes, and, in the account of how Marduk shaped the world, a tail and an udder. Scholars disagree whether the Babylonians imagined her as a dragon, a sea serpent, or simply the sea itself in a vaguely bodily form; her name is the ordinary Akkadian word for "sea." The picture of Tiamat as a great sea dragon became common in modern times. A famous Assyrian relief from Nimrud, often captioned as Marduk fighting Tiamat, actually shows a different god fighting a winged monster.

Origins and Sources

The Enūma Eliš was recited in Babylon during the New Year festival. Copies were found in the 19th century in the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, and George Smith published the first translation in 1876. Scholars such as W. G. Lambert date its composition to the late second millennium BCE, possibly the reign of Nebuchadnezzar I (about 1100 BCE), though older stories lie behind it. Hermann Gunkel argued in 1895 that the Hebrew word tehom, the "deep" of Genesis 1, is related to Tiamat's name.

Legacy

Tiamat is the most famous example of the "combat with chaos" myth, in which a storm god defeats a sea monster and builds an orderly world from it. The same pattern appears in the Canaanite stories of Lotan, the biblical Leviathan, and Greek Typhon. Her modern fame owes much to Dungeons & Dragons, which turned her into a five-headed queen of evil dragons; that version is a modern invention. More on her appears among Draconika's famous dragons.

Related

• Mušḫuššu: The mušḫuššu is the scaly, horned dragon of ancient Mesopotamia, with a serpent's head, lion forelegs, and eagle talons, best known as the sacred beast of Marduk on Babylon's Ishtar Gate.
• Lotan: Lotan, properly Litan, is the seven-headed sea serpent of Canaanite myth known from the clay tablets of Ugarit, defeated by the storm god Baal and his sister Anat, and the forerunner of the biblical Leviathan.
• Leviathan: Leviathan is the great sea monster of the Hebrew Bible, a fire-breathing, scale-armored serpent of the deep that only God can tame, descended from the Canaanite sea serpent Lotan.
• Typhon: Typhon is the most fearsome monster of Greek myth, a giant with a hundred serpent heads who challenged Zeus for rule of the cosmos and was struck down by thunderbolts.
• Tiamat (Dungeons & Dragons): Tiamat in Dungeons & Dragons is the five-headed Dragon Queen, goddess of the evil chromatic dragons, a modern game creation that borrows its name from the ancient Babylonian sea goddess.
• Famous Dragons
• The History of Dragons
• Dragons Across Cultures

Sources and Further Reading

• W. G. Lambert, Babylonian Creation Myths (Eisenbrauns, 2013)
• Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others (Oxford World's Classics, 1989)
• Thorkild Jacobsen, "The Battle between Marduk and Tiamat," Journal of the American Oriental Society 88 (1968)
• Hermann Gunkel, Creation and Chaos in the Primeval Era and the Eschaton, trans. K. William Whitney Jr. (Eerdmans, 2006)

Cite this entry: “Tiamat,” Draconika Encyclopedia of Dragons, https://www.draconika.com/dragons/tiamat.