Tiamat

In Mesopotamian religion, Tiamat ( or , ) is a primordial goddess of the sea, mating with Abzû, the god of the groundwater, to produce younger gods. She is the symbol of the chaos of primordial creation. She is referred to as a woman and described as "the glistening one". It is suggested that there are two parts to the Tiamat mythos. In the first, she is a creator goddess, through a sacred marriage between different waters, peacefully creating the cosmos through successive generations. In the second Chaoskampf Tiamat is considered the monstrous embodiment of primordial chaos. Some sources identify her with images of a sea serpent or dragon. In the Enûma Elish, the Babylonian epic of creation, Tiamat bears the first generation of deities; her husband, Abzu, correctly assuming that they are planning to kill him and usurp his throne, later makes war upon them and is killed. Enraged, she also wars upon her husband's murderers, bringing forth multitudes of monsters as offspring. She is then slain by Enki's son, the storm-god Marduk, but not before she brings forth the monsters of the Mesopotamian pantheon, including the first dragons, whose bodies she fills with "poison instead of blood". Marduk then integrates elements of her body into the heavens and the earth. Etymology Thorkild Jacobsen and Walter Burkert both argue for a connection with the Akkadian word for sea, tâmtu, following an early form, ti'amtum. Burkert continues by making a linguistic connection to Tethys. The later form , 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 Enûma 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. The Babylonian epic Enûma Elish is named for its incipit: "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".