Tiamat

Tiamat is the primordial goddess of the salt sea in Mesopotamian myth, and in the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish she is both the origin of the cosmos and the enemy that must be destroyed to order it. At the beginning she mingles her salt waters with Apsu, the sweet fresh waters, and from their union the first gods are born. But when the younger gods' clamour disturbs the primeval quiet and Apsu is killed, Tiamat rises in wrath, spawning an army of monsters and champions to avenge him and destroy her descendants. The gods, terrified, turn to the young storm-god Marduk, who agrees to fight on condition that he be made king of the gods.

In the decisive battle he traps her in a net, drives the winds into her open mouth, and splits her body in two, and from the halves of her corpse he fashions the world, making the sky from one half and the earth from the other, her weeping eyes becoming the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates. The myth encodes a distinctly Mesopotamian theology: the ordered world is not created out of nothing but violently imposed on a prior chaos, and it is built, quite literally, out of the body of the defeated chaos-mother, an order that never wholly escapes the disorder from which it was made.

The Enuma Elish, the Babylonian text that tells of Tiamat's defeat and dismemberment at the hands of Marduk to form heaven and earth, is a considerably later composition than the older Sumerian religious traditions that preceded it, and Assyriologists generally read it as much as a work of political theology as a cosmogony. Its central purpose appears to be establishing Marduk, the patron god of Babylon specifically, as the supreme deity of the entire pantheon, a claim that mattered because it justified Babylon's own political primacy among Mesopotamian cities at the time the text was composed and promoted.

Earlier Sumerian creation traditions do not feature this particular combat myth or this particular hierarchy, which is part of why scholars treat the Tiamat and Marduk story as a Babylonian theological program layered onto older material rather than as the original or most ancient Mesopotamian account of creation. Tiamat herself, described as the primordial saltwater ocean and mother of the first generation of gods, predates Marduk's story considerably as a cosmological concept, and her transformation into a monstrous enemy to be violently defeated specifically serves the text's larger argument for Marduk's supremacy, making her villainy in the received version a function of Babylonian political needs rather than a fixed trait carried unchanged from the earliest Mesopotamian religious thought.