Tiamat is the primordial goddess of the salt sea in Mesopotamian religion, the personification of the watery chaos out of which the world was made, and in the Babylonian creation epic the Enuma Elish she is the mother of the first gods. At the beginning, the poem says, there were only two waters mingling together: Apsu, the fresh water, and Tiamat, the salt sea; from their union the younger gods were born. When the noise and restlessness of these younger gods disturbs Apsu and he plans to destroy them, he is killed first, and Tiamat, roused to vengeance, brings forth an army of monsters and serpents and sets the god Kingu over them to make war on her own descendants.
The conflict ends in the Enuma Elish's most famous scene: the young god Marduk, chosen champion of the threatened gods and granted supreme authority in exchange, kills Tiamat in single combat, catching her in a net and driving the winds into her body before splitting her corpse in two to form the sky above and the earth below, and from the blood of her general Kingu the poem has the god Ea fashion humankind. The full text of the Enuma Elish was recovered from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh and other sites in the nineteenth century, and its recitation formed a central part of the Babylonian New Year festival, the Akitu, celebrated each spring at Babylon's temple of Marduk, so that Tiamat's defeat was ritually retold as a founding act of cosmic and civic order every year.