Tiamat (Mythology)

A cylinder seal impression dating back to the 8th century BC that possibly depicts the battle between Marduk and Tiamat.

Tiamat is a primordial goddess from ancient Mesopotamian and Babylonian mythology who is the embodiment of the saltwater sea and is most commonly depicted in a dragon-like form.

She was one of the first of two entities to ever exist, the other being her husband Apsu, god of the freshwater sea. Through their unification, she would birth the first generation of gods. Tiamat is also regarded as the primordial representation of chaos in the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish, where she wages war against her descendants who killed her husband, only to be killed by the god Marduk. Having had split her body in half in a divine conflict, Marduk would then form Heaven and Earth from the remnants of her divided corpse.

Etymology

The word Tiamat comes from tiamtum ("sea"), with the name itself being an uncontracted form of the word tâmtu ("sea"). The word is in an "absolute state" where the noun is the same as the vocative, with this type of grammar being used when a person or deity is directly invoked. Thus, the word Tiamat literally means "O, Sea!". Additionally, the word has been proposed to be related to the term תְּהﯴם ("the deep" or "the primeval ocean") from the Book of Genesis, although this cannot be verified.

Tiamat was also known as Thalattē (as a variant of thalassa, the Greek word for "sea") in the Hellenistic Babylonian era. It is thought that the name of Tiamat was dropped in secondary translations of the original religious texts because some Akkadian copyists of Enûma Elish substituted the ordinary word for "sea" for Tiamat, since the two names had become essentially the same, due to association.

One of Tiamat's other names is "Ummu-Hubur", meaning "river of life" in ancient Babylonian and Sumerian religions, referencing her as the "mother sea who formed all things".

Description

There have been different possible depictions of Tiamat throughout the course of history, none of which however actually originate from ancient Mesopotamia. In the Enuma Elish, Tiamat is never given a clear image, but is described to have a head, a neck, a tail, a udder, a thigh, “lower parts”, a belly, ribs, a skull, eyes, nostrils, a mouth, breasts, arteries, a heart, and blood.

Possible images of Tiamat usually depict the goddess as a horned dragon with or without forearms. A relief depicting a god fighting a monster resembling a griffin (see below), is often identified as Marduk and Tiamat respectively. However, noting that the relief was found at a temple of the god Ninurta, scholar Anthony Green suggests that the monster is instead the beast Asakku or Asag who was slain by Ninurta in the poem Lugal-e. Other modern academic sources identity Tiamat as a sea serpent with dragon-like features.

Mythology

In the Enuma Elish , Tiamat existed in a time when there was no heaven or earth, with there only being the primordial seas, personified as both herself and her consort Apsu. They intermingled, leading Tiamat to birth the first gods, Lahmu and Lahamu. As more gods were created, the gods began to engage in clamor and other activities, which irritated Tiamat, yet she still cared for them enough not to silence them on the issue.

This clamor would also however irritate her husband, Apsu, who would come to her to discuss the matter. While they conversed, Apsu decided that he would destroy their children’s way of life, which Tiamat immediately rejected and told Apsu to let the gods be. Whether this encouragement helped or not would not be known, as the gods then heard about Apsu’s plan. Enraged, the god Ea put Apsu into a slumber and killed him while he slept.

Wanting to avenge her husband and after being encouraged by several opposing gods to destroy her husband’s murderers, Tiamat began to plot. Preparing to destroy her children, she bore eleven beasts of chaos whose blood was replaced with venom, of which included serpents, demons, a dragon, a Hydra, a Hairy Hero, a Savage dog, a Scorpion-Man, a Bull-Man, and a Fish-Man. She also gave the god Quingu the Tablet of Destinies which she had possessed and put the deity as her minion's leader in the war of which would come.

The gods fought back against her creations in a large divine conflict, with Marduk, the king of gods eventually challenging Tiamat directly. Marduk demanded her to reason, which turned Tiamat into a frenzy, inciting spells that caused her underlings to tremble. Marduk would then proceed to slay her with the Evil Wind, first bounding her before smashing her skull and splitting her body into two. Marduk then formed the heavens and the earth out of the divided parts of Tiamat`s corpse, formed the clouds from her foam, made the Euphyrstes and Tigress rivers out of her eyes, and twisted her tail into the Milky Way.

Culture

The Enuma Elish was recited as a ritual at the Akitu festival in Babylon, which had become a New Year's festival by the Neo-Babylonian period. The Enuma Elish's rehearsal was used as means to empower the enthronement of the Babylonian king. This ritual lasted into the Persian and Hellenistic periods.

Analysis

Some academic sources suggest there are two parts to the myth, the first in which Tiamat is a creator goddess through a "sacred marriage" between salt and freshwater that peacefully created the cosmos through successive generations of her children. In the second, Tiamat is considered the monstrous embodiment of primordial chaos.

Tiamat's death by Marduk has been theorized by various academic sources, first suggested by British scholar Robert Graves and popularized by historians such as Merlin Stone, as a mythological representation of a shift in power from a matriarchal society to a patriarchy in ancient and prehistoric human civilizations, particularly ancient Mesopotamian civilization. This theory has an element of truth, with the status and worship of female goddesses lowering during Hammurabi's reign. This theory is challenged, however, by the fact that there is no evidence that there was a matriarchal society prior for the course of ancient Mesopotamian history. Conflicting evidence includes that male deities have had dominant roles in even the earliest of Sumerian transcripts regarding the gods.

Comparative Mythology

The battle between Tiamat and Marduk in the Enuma Elish is one of the earliest examples of the Chaoskampf motif found in various mythologies throughout the world, with the original proposer of the trope Hermann Gunkel having compared the battle between Tiamat and Marduk to the Book of Genesis. Tiamat, and the Enuma Elish, may have also been influenced by the battle between Ninurta and the bird Anzu as well as the battle between Ninurta and the sea dragon Kur, both from ancient Mesopotamian mythology.

The notion of Marduk cutting up Tiamat and the winds summoned by the god are reminiscent of the Lernaean Hydra being cut up by Heracles in ancient Greek mythology and the stormy sea winds that accompany the dragon Typhon in Hesiod's Theogony respectively.

Tiamat has been associated with Biblical monsters such as the Tanin, Rehab, and Leviathan, as well as the sea serpent Lotan from the Ugaritic Epics. In a bilingual list of gods found at Ugarit, the Akkadian version of the sea god Yam is Tiamat.

Origin

The model of Tiamat has been suggested to be the unification of two separate gods. These include the motherly and benevolent Sumerian goddess Nammu/Namma, who is similarly referred to as the primordial ocean where the gods came from, and an unrelated malevolent sea god, perhaps the Levantine Yam. Tiamat also shows similarities to the Sumerian goddess Inanna, Inanna's characteristics in the Epic of Gilgamesh (known then as Ishtar) as being sensitive to rejection and being prone to violence tying in with Tiamat's wrathful persona.

There is further the question of how Tiamat's association of the sea could have originated despite the sea not being common observance for the ancient Babylonians and the word "Tiamat" having a Semitic root. In response to this, some scholars have argued that the characteristics of Tiamat could have been influenced by the Amorites, a group of Semitic-speaking people from the Mediterranean.

In Popular Culture

Tiamat is prevalent in popular culture, most notably being in the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons.

• In the Final Fantasy video game series, she appears as a dragon-type enemy in many of the games.
• In Bruce Colville's Jeremy Thatcher: Dragon Hatcher (from the Magic Shop series), a boy who is given a dragon egg from Elias's magic shop names his dragon hatchling Tiamat, the two developing a mental connection.
• In the Japanese mobile game and anime Fate/Grand Order, Tiamat appears as massive horned woman where she had survived her initial defeat by her children and remained in a slumber, waiting to return to and claim the world as her own once again.
• In the online role-playing game Granblue Fantasy, Tiamat appears as a boss. She is associated with the wind, and is portrayed a humanoid women that is accompanied by three serpent heads.
• In the tabletop roleplaying game Pathfinder, Tiamat appears as a deity. According to dragon mythology, Tiamat was one of the first two entities to exist alongside Apsu. After Apsu declared war on his and Tiamat's first son Dahak after their son began to kill his other siblings for sport, Tiamat healed Dahak upon his request and offered to heal wounded dragons apart of Apsu's army. Those who accepted this were turned into the first Chromatic Dragons, which caused enough confusion as the war continued that Dahak and his followers were able to escape.
• In the online MOBA video game Smite, Tiamat is a playable character, the first mage released in 2021. In the game, she is regarded as the mother of all creation and after having waking up from a deep slumber, she aims to retake control of the world she created from the lesser gods.

Gallery

External Links

• Tiamat on Wikipedia
• Tiamat on Encyclopedia.com
• Tiamat on The Circle of the Dragon