In the Enûma Elish, the Babylonian epic of creation, Tiamat bears the first generation of deities after mingling her waters with those of Apsu, her consort. The gods continue to reproduce, forming a noisy new mass of divine children. Apsu, driven to violence by the noise they make, seeks to destroy them and is killed. Enraged, Tiamat also wars upon those of her own and Apsu’s children who killed her consort, bringing forth a series of monsters as weapons. She also takes a new consort, Qingu, and bestows on him the Tablet of Destinies, which represents legitimate divine rulership.[2][3] She is ultimately defeated and slain by Enki‘s son, the storm-god Marduk, but not before she conjures forth monsters whose bodies she fills with “poison instead of blood”. Marduk dismembers her, and then constructs and structures elements of the cosmos from Tiamat’s body.
Anna’s Notes : The Violence of this Depiction is not Natural. Already, this is evidence of Sifra and Kakía present. This depicts the 2nd Usurp, Sifra being the first Usurp.
With Tiamat, Abzu (or Apsû) fathered the elder deities Lahmu and Lahamu (masc. the ‘hairy’), a title given to the gatekeepers at Enki’s Abzu/E’engurra-temple in Eridu. Lahmu and Lahamu, in turn, were the parents of the ‘ends’ of the heavens (Anshar, from an-šar, ‘heaven-totality/end’) and the earth (Kishar); Anshar and Kishar were considered to meet at the horizon, becoming, thereby, the parents of Anu (Heaven) and Ki (Earth).
Tiamat was the “shining” personification of the sea who roared and smote in the chaos of original creation. She and Abzu filled the cosmic abyss with the primeval waters. She is “Ummu-Hubur [lit. ‘Mother-Watercourse‘] who formed all things”.
In the myth recorded on cuneiform tablets, the deity Enki (later Ea) believed correctly that Abzu was planning to murder the younger deities as a consequence of his aggravation with the noisy tumult they created. This premonition led Enki to capture Abzu and hold him prisoner beneath Abzu’s own temple, the E-Abzu (‘temple of Abzu’). This angered Kingu, their son, who reported the event to Tiamat, whereupon she fashioned eleven monsters to battle the deities in order to avenge Abzu’s death. These were her own offspring: Bašmu (‘Venomous Snake’), Ušumgallu (‘Great Dragon’), Mušmaḫḫū (‘Exalted Serpent’), Mušḫuššu (‘Furious Snake’), Laḫmu (the ‘Hairy One’), Ugallu (the ‘Big Weather-Beast’), Uridimmu (‘Mad Lion’), Girtablullû (‘Scorpion-Man’), Umū dabrūtu (‘Violent Storms’), Kulullû (‘Fish-Man’), and Kusarikku (‘Bull-Man’).
Tiamat was in possession of the Tablet of Destinies, and in the primordial battle, she gave the relic to Kingu, the deity she had chosen as her lover and the leader of her host, and who was also one of her children. The terrified deities were rescued by Anu, who secured their promise to revere him as “king of the gods.” He fought Tiamat with the arrows of the winds, a net, a club, and an invincible spear. Anu was later replaced first by Enlil, and (in the late version that has survived after the First Dynasty of Babylon) then subsequently by Marduk, the son of Ea.
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, Marduk made from her ribs the vault of heaven and earth. Her weeping eyes became the sources of the Tigris and the Euphrates, her tail became the Milky Way.[11] With the approval of the elder deities, he took the Tablet of Destinies from Kingu, and installed himself as the head of the Babylonian pantheon. Kingu was captured and later was slain: his red blood mixed with the red clay of the Earth would make the body of humankind, created to act as the servant of the younger Igigi deities.
The principal theme of the epic is the rightful elevation of Marduk to command over all the deities. American Assyriologist E. A. Speiser remarked in 1942 that “It has long been realized that the Marduk epic, for all its local coloring and probable elaboration by the Babylonian theologians, reflects in substance older Sumerian material … The exact Sumerian prototype, however, has not turned up so far.”[check quotation syntax][12] However, this surmise that the Babylonian version of the story is based upon a modified version of an older epic, in which Enlil, not Marduk, was the god who slew Tiamat,[13] has been more recently dismissed as “distinctly improbable”.[14]