Split into Heaven and Earth

The climax of the Enuma Elish is the combat between Tiamat and the young champion of the gods, Marduk, the city-god of Babylon, whose rise the epic is written to justify. Armed with the winds and a great net, Marduk faces the sea-dragon; when she opens her mouth he drives the winds into her so that she cannot close it, and pierces her with an arrow. He then splits her vast body in two like a shell, setting one half above as the sky and the other below as the earth, and from her waters he makes the clouds, and from her eyes the sources of the Tigris and the Euphrates, so that the ordered world is literally built from the body of the defeated chaos-goddess.

The myth of a storm- or sky-god defeating a primeval sea-dragon and shaping the world from her body is one of the most widespread patterns in Near Eastern religion, and scholars have long compared it with the combat imagery found elsewhere in the region. Tiamat stands as the great image of the chaos that must be overcome and then remade into order.