Primordial Mother of the Salt Sea
Tiamat is the primordial salt sea. When Enuma Elish opens, nothing has yet been named; only she and the freshwater Apsu mingle their waters, and within her the generations of gods are born. Through the poem's first half she is barely a figure at all, a fertile immensity of water; only when she goes to war does a body emerge — the text mentions a tail, a neck, jaws that cannot be approached. Later readers have imagined her as a dragon or sea serpent, though the tablets never draw a complete portrait.
The war begins as revenge. The young gods' clamor drives Apsu to plot their destruction, and Ea kills him first by a spell. When the gods disturb her again, Tiamat is persuaded to act: she spawns eleven monsters — the snake-dragon, the great lion, the scorpion-man, the fish-man, the bull-man and the rest — raises Qingu to command, and fastens the Tablet of Destinies on his breast. The elder gods flee before her; young Marduk exacts kingship as his fee, then catches her in a net, drives the four winds into her open mouth until her belly distends, and splits her heart with an arrow. He cleaves the corpse 'like a fish for drying': one half becomes the sky, the other the earth; her eyes are opened into the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates, her udders heaped into mountains.
Every Babylonian new year the epic was recited entire, replaying the world's making from her body. The five-headed dragon queen of Dungeons and Dragons, introduced in 1975, borrows her name and little else.
