Tiamat: The Primeval Sea Whose Body Became the World

The primeval salt sea, mother of the gods, whose split body became the sky and the earth in the Babylonian creation story.

Tiamat is the primeval salt water in the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish, mother of the first gods, whose body Marduk splits in two to make the sky and the earth.

Tiamat is the primeval salt water in the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish. Her name is related to the Akkadian word for 'sea'. At the beginning, before heaven and earth had names, her waters mingle with Apsu, the fresh water, and from them the first gods are born. King's 1902 translation renders the opening: 'When in the height heaven was not named, And the earth beneath did not yet bear a name'.

The young gods are noisy. Apsu plots to destroy them and is killed by Ea. Tiamat then prepares for war, gives birth to eleven kinds of monsters, and makes the god Kingu her commander, fastening on his breast the Tablet of Destinies. The tablet gives its holder authority over the fates of the universe, and the gods are terrified. Ea and Anu both turn back from facing her.

Marduk meets her in battle. He drives the winds into her open mouth, shoots an arrow into her, and then 'split her up like a flat fish into two halves'. One half becomes the sky, with a bar and guards set so her waters cannot escape; from the other he shapes the earth, and the Tigris and Euphrates flow from her eyes.

Many scholars compare her with the Hebrew tehom, 'the deep', in Genesis 1:2, a related word. Zecharia Sitchin argued that Tiamat was a planet destroyed in a collision that created Earth and the asteroid belt; the text describes a divine battle, not astronomy. Tiamat remains one of the oldest images of chaos as a living being: a mother who becomes the enemy, and whose body becomes the world.