Enuma Elish opens before the naming of anything, with two waters and nothing else: Apsu the fresh water and Tiamat the sea, their waters mingled in one body. From that mingling come Lahmu and Lahamu, then Anshar and Kishar, then Anu, then Ea. The young gods are loud. They dance and disturb the belly of Tiamat, and Apsu can neither rest by day nor sleep by night.
Apsu goes with his vizier Mummu to Tiamat and proposes to destroy them so that quiet may return. Tiamat refuses, angry that he would unmake what the two of them made. Mummu urges him on. Ea, who knows everything, hears the plan, draws a figure and recites a spell of great power that puts Apsu into a deep sleep. He takes the crown from Apsu, puts on his radiance, kills him, and binds Mummu with a nose rope.
What follows is the point of the episode. Ea builds his own dwelling on top of the dead Apsu and calls it Apsu, and there, in a chamber within it, Marduk is born. The killing is not simply a victory; it is the making of a place. The god of wisdom and incantation takes up residence in the freshwater deep, and the deep keeps the name of the being it was, which is how Mesopotamian cosmology usually handles the relation between a person and a place. The parallel with Tiamat is exact: she too becomes the world built out of her body.