Tiamat

In Babylonian mythology, Tiamat is the sea, personified as a goddess, and a monstrous embodiment of primordial chaos. In the Enûma Elish, the Babylonian epic of creation, she gives birth to the first generation of gods; she later makes war upon them and is split in two by the storm-god Marduk, who uses her body to form the heavens and the earth. She was known as Thalattē (the Greek word for "sea") in the Hellenistic Babylonian Berossus' first volume of universal history, and some copyists of Enûma Elish slipped and substituted the ordinary word for "sea" for Tiamat.

Etymology

Thorkild Jacobsen and Walter Burkert both argue for an etymological connection between the goddess' name and the Akkadian word for sea (tâmtu) in its earlier form (ti'amtum), which was derived from the Sumerian ti ("life") and ama ("mother"). Jacobson explicates this identity by drawing upon a fortuitous copyist's error:

That she is, in fact, the sea can be seen from the opening lines of the epic where it is said that she and the sweet waters, Apsu, mingled their waters together, and from the fact that some copyists of Enuma elish write tâmtum, the normal form of the word for "sea," for Tiamat. This would hardly have been possible if her identity with the sea had not been clearly felt by the copyist and his readers.

Tiamat has also been claimed to be also cognate with West Semitic "tehwom" ("the deeps") mentioned in Genesis 1 (which represents one of the correspondences that will be explored in more detail below).

Mythology

Appearance and Characterization

First and foremost, Babylonian mythology characterizes Tiamat as the salty, primordial sea, whose roiling chaos provided the generative force for the first living deities (as discussed below). In addition to this cosmogonic role, she also played the part of the cosmic aggressor, lashing out violently against the younger gods who lost her favor. In this context, as told in the Enuma Elish, her physical description includes, a tail, a thigh, "lower parts" (which shake together), a belly, an udder, ribs, a neck, a head, a skull, eyes, nostrils, a mouth, and lips. She has insides, a heart, arteries, and blood.

Hornblower provides a sketch of the sources detailing her more menacing (and more concrete) physical form in his study of early representations of dragons:

Tiamatis generally represented as a kind of fierce griffin, but in early cylinders as a huge snake (W., p. 198, figs. 578-9; and Budge : ' The Babylonian Legends of Creation,' p. 29); the latter version seems to be the earlier, and it may be that when the myth travelled inland to Assyria, and the hero became Assur instead of Bel-Marduk (and before him, perhaps, of Ea or Enlil), the form of the monster changed in sympathy-a suggestion which cannot at present be confirmed, for as yet no early Babylonian cylinders rendering the combat have been found (W., p. 197). As Tiamat was a creature of the ocean, she should be, at least theoretically, clad in scales, and in fact dragons are often thus depicted, notably the great ones decorating the walls of the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, where they served, of course, for protection; they are griffin-shaped with scaly bodies and serpents' heads with the reptile's flickering tongue (L. W. King : ' A History of Babylon,' p. 51, fig. 13). The dragon in this form was the attribute-animal of Be1 (M., vol. i, p. 226, fig. 137); as a griffin it had the same connection with the god Assur, and may be seen accompanying him as he fights Tiamat, who herself has the same shape (W., p. 199, figs. 567-8) — a scene illustrating strikingly the double nature of the monster, tutelary in one connection, malignant in another.

This description accords well with Barton's earlier account:

We learn, however, from Babylonian and Assylian sculptures and seals that Tiamat was regarded not only as the female watery principle, whose waters through union with those of the male principle produced all life, but also as a seadragon with the head of a tiger or griffin, with wings, four feet, claws, and a scaly tail. This composite figure was evidently intended to signify both the power and the hideousness of this evil enemy of the great gods.

Creation

The SuBabylonian Tiamat was the "shining" personification of salt water who roared and smote in the chaos of original creation. She and Apsu filled the cosmic abyss with the primeval waters. She is "Ummu-Hubur who formed all things". Apsu (or Abzu, from Sumerian Ab = water, Zu = far) fathered upon Tiamat the Elder Gods Lahmu and Lahamu (the "muddy"), a title given to the gatekeepers at the Enki Abzu temple in Eridu. Lahmu and Lahamu, in turn, were the parents of the axis or pivot of the heavens (Anshar, from An = heaven, Shar = axle or pivot) and the earth (Kishar), and Anshar and Kishar were considered to meet on the horizon, becoming thereby the parents of Anu and Ki.

This "mixing of the waters" is a natural feature of the middle Persian Gulf, where fresh waters from the Arabian aquifer mix and mingle with the salt waters of the sea This characteristic is especially true of the region of Bahrain (whose name means in Arabic, "twin waters"), which is thought to be the site of Dilmun, the original site of the Sumerian creation.

Contention with Marduk

In the myth, the god Enki (later Ea) believed correctly that Apsu, upset with the chaos they created, was planning to murder the younger gods; and so slew him. This angered Kingu, their son, who reported the event to Tiamat, whereupon she fashioned monsters to battle the gods. These were her own offspring: giant sea serpents, storm demons, fish-men, scorpion-men and many others. Tiamat possessed the Tablets of Destiny, and in the primordial battle she gave them to Kingu, the god she had chosen as her lover and the leader of her host. The Gods gathered in terror, but Anu, (replaced later first by Enlil and, in the late version that has survived after the First Dynasty of Babylon, by Marduk, the son of Ea), first extracting a promise that he would be revered as "king of the Gods", overcame her, armed with the arrows of the winds, a net, a club, and an invincible spear.

And the lord stood upon Tiamat's hinder parts,

And with his merciless club he smashed her skull.

He cut through the channels of her blood,

And he made the North wind bear it away into secret places.

Slicing Tiamat in half, he made from her ribs the vault of heaven and earth. Her weeping eyes became the source of the Tigris and the Euphrates. With the approval of the elder gods, he took from Kingu the Tablets of Destiny, installing himself as the head of the Babylonian pantheon. Kingu was captured and was later slain with his red blood mixed with the red clay of the Earth to make the body of humankind, created to act as the servant of the younger Igigi Gods.

There is evidence that the Babylonian version of the story is based upon a slightly modified version of an older Epic in which Enlil, not Marduk, was the God who slew Tiamat.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Barton, George A. "Tiamat." Journal of the American Oriental Society 15 (1893). 1-27.
• Beaulieu, Paul-Alain. "The Babylonian Man in the Moon." Journal of Cuneiform Studies 51 (1999). 91-99.
• Burkert, Walter. The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influences on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age. Translated by Margaret Pinder. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. ISBN 067464364X.
• Crawford, Harriet E. W. Dilmun and its Gulf Neighbours. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ISBN 0521586798.
• Crawford, Harriet; Killick, Robert & Moon, Jane (editors). The Dilmun Temple at Saar: Bahrain and Its Archaeological Inheritance: Saar Excavation Reports / London-Bahrain Archaeological Expedition. London: Kegan Paul, 1997. ISBN 0710304870.
• Dalley, Stephanie. Myths from Mesopotamia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. ISBN 0192835890.
• Hansen, William. "Foam-Born Aphrodite and the Mythology of Transformation." The American Journal of Philology 121:1 (Spring 2000). 1-19.
• Hornblower, G. D. "Early Dragon-Forms." Man 33 (May 1933). 79-87.
• Jacobsen, Thorkild. "The Battle between Marduk and Tiamat." Journal of the American Oriental Society 88:1 (January-March 1968). 104-108.
• James, E. O. The Worship of the Skygod: A Comparative Study in Semitic and Indo-European Religion. London: University of London, the Athlone Press, 1963.
  • Reviewed by Lambert, W. G. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 27:1 (1964). 157-158.
• Mondi, Robert. "ΧΑΟΣ and the Hesiodic Cosmogony." Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 92 (1989). 1-41.
• Powell, Barry B. Classical Myth (Second Edition). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998. ISBN 0-13-716714-8.
• Unger, Eckhard. "From the Cosmos Picture to the World Map." Imago Mundi 2 (1937). 1-7.
• Yahuda, A. S. The Language of the Pentateuch in its Relation to Egyptian. London: Oxford University Press and H. Milford, 1933.

External links

All links retrieved October 20, 2007

• The Babylonian Creation Epic Enuma Elish at sacred-texts.com
• Another translation of The Babylonian creation story
• Brief article on Tiamat at Encyclopedia Mythica

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