(host) A primordial mother, a divine female who births the first generation of deities in Mesopotamian mythology.
Tiamat is crucial to life and death.
Tiamat makes up the salty waters of creation.
The ocean is known for its prolific capacity to generate living organisms.
Life is born from the sea.
In the case of Tiamat, so are monsters.
This ancient Mesopotamian goddess produced 11 different frightening beasts, from dragons to scorpion men, but is Tiamat herself really all that frightening?
Is the mother of monsters even a monster?
[dramatic music] I'm Dr. Emily Zarka, and this is "Monstrum."
Much of Mesopotamian mythology attributes natural phenomena to intelligent deities.
This becomes particularly significant in relation to rainfall, since the region's early adoption of an irrigation agricultural system defined its success and helped secure the development of numerous large-scale permanent settlements.
Due to soil conditions, land could easily become flooded and salinized, making cultivation challenging and presumably at the whim of the gods.
So it makes sense that one of their central myths would involve two primordial bodies of water, Apsu, source of all fresh water, and Tiamat, the source of all saltwater.
Tiamat's written history begins around the second half of the second millennium BCE in the Enuma Elis, now commonly known as the Babylonian Epic of Creation.
These cuneiform tablets are the backbone of Mesopotamian mythology.
Her appearance in this text is ambiguous.
It reveals she is female, but little else is known.
Although she is at least somewhat humanoid, it also indicates that she is made of water.
This story gets a bit confusing so I have this family tree to help us out.
The language in the text suggests that the primordial deities' mingling involved biological reproduction with Apsu as begetter and father of all and Tiamat as the mother who births all from her womb.
All of the original gods in the Mesopotamian pantheon are produced by these two.
As their progeny in turn procreate, each god becomes more powerful than the next.
Ansar and Kisar's son Anu begot Ea, also know as Nudimmud.
Ea was the champion among his fathers, god of wisdom, magic, and water.
Known for his trickery and mischief, he and the other Gods amused themselves by making a racket within Tiamat's belly, where they lived.
One day, Ea overhears Apsu, who we might consider his great-grandfather, complaining to Tiamat about their children and suggesting that they be killed.
Horrified and angered, Tiamat refuses, suggesting they take more lenient disciplinary action, which Apsu ignores.
Ea slaughters Apsu and uses his body to create a new dwelling place which is named Apsu, which is morbid AF.
All of this is still in Tiamat's womb, by the way.
Patricide complete, Ea has his own son Marduk, the strongest yet of the gods.
Marduk is gifted with the power of the four winds and uses them to stir up a flood wave in Tiamat's womb, which exacerbates all the other gods.
In a colossal act of retaliation, either motivated by revenge or insult depending on interpretation, Tiamat births 11 monsters into the world.
Girl made an army of kids, ones with sharp teeth and poison for blood, giant serpents, dragons, and raging dragons; apparently there is a distinction, hairy hero men, lion men, weather demons, snakes, scorpion men, fish men, bull men, and the fantastically ambiguous aggressive demons.
A bit panicked by this influx of creations, the other gods grant Marduk the power to create and destroy.
Ea further equips his son with a scepter, throne, staff, and other weaponry.
Marduk makes a bow, calls up some winds and thunderbolts, and readies for battle.
Marduk provokes Tiamat with insults and she launches into a hasty attack, leaving herself vulnerable.
She is captured in a net and overwhelmed by the winds before Marduk's arrow pierces her stomach, tearing her open.
He manages to subdue her monstrous children before returning to Tiamat, crushing her skull with a mace and slitting her arteries open.
Marduk uses one half of her dead body to form the heavens and the other to craft the earth.
From her eyes, he creates the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, from her breasts he makes mountains.
What is left of her becomes the oceans.
He traps Tiamat's monstrous offspring at his feet and forms images of them to place at the entrance of the dwelling Apsu to remind the world of their existence.
The Tiamat story can be better understood by looking at earlier, seemingly disparate mythologies that all blended together to create our monster mother's story.
Remember how Tiamat birthed 11 monsters to avenge her partner's death?
Well, that number pops up in other, older Mesopotamian lore like the Tale of Ninurta, an ancient Sumerian warrior god associated with agriculture who slew 11 enemies before designing the world.
And two Sumerian texts from the late third millennium BCE contain a list of monster kin eerily similar to those attributed to Tiamat.
And how many were there?
11.
Then there are monstrous deities associated with the tumultuous sea, such as the Canaanite Yam.
Gendered masculine, he is described as both a serpent and a dragon with seven heads, depending on the source, able to wield chaotic power.
Like Tiamat, Yam was defeated by a heroic young god, Baal.
Tiamat herself appears by name in an evocation as patron of a fierce warrior in a text from Central Mesopotamia around 2350 BCE.
Still nothing in the Canaanite or Sumerian narratives suggest Tiamat would be a monster, just a powerful god.
Her great power is admired and feared but with respectful reverence more than outright horror, a potentially monstrous god rather than strictly a monster.
But what would make something a monster by Sumerian or Akkadian standards?
Well, there was no singular word to categorize fearsome creatures, but their monstrosity was marked in images and texts by a combination of predatory animal features like teeth, wings, and claws, visual traits that would be grafted onto Tiamat in the Middle Bronze Age and first millennium.
Marduk was once only a local god said to preside over the city of Babylon.
His mythical status grew along with the rise of Hammurabi, the sixth king of Babylon.
To help solidify his control over the people of the dynasty and eventual rule over almost all the peoples of Mesopotamia the king used the Code of Hammurabi, a legal text which basically boils down to the laws of retribution.
Marduk's defeat of Tiamat came to represent the installment of the real-life Babylonian king onto the throne as the victor over so-called chaos.
Marduk, or Bel as he came to be known as the new national god, provided a mythological representation of good over evil, law over lawlessness, a fitting metaphor for King Hammurabi's right to rule.
The myth of Tiamat and Marduk's great battle received a ritual portrayal every year at a spring agricultural festival called Akitu.
In the Neo-Babylonian period, this would become a New Year celebration that lasted into the Hellenistic period.
After that, Tiamat's story was largely lost to time.
That was until the 19th century when the Enuma Elis was first translated into English, giving Tiamat new prominence in popular culture.
Today's modern construction of Tiamat is largely due to Canadian author and clergyman George A. Barton, whose 1893 article dubbed "Tiamat" compares her to the biblical serpent Leviathan and the great red dragon of Revelations.
Most damnably, he describes her as a female dragon, queen of a hideous host who are hostile to the gods.
He goes as far as to say that her apocalyptic imagery indicates the popular personification of hideousness, arrogance, and evil.
Even outside of this odd grab bag of religious beliefs, dude clearly has it out for the primordial goddess.
Since then, Tiamat was commonly painted as demonic chaos as other publications adopted a negative view of her.
She became, even in her best light, the bad mother in the story.
When Tiamat is adapted for popular culture today, she retains the evil dragon status.
In "Dungeons and Dragons," Tiamat is not a mother but a daughter, the offspring of the dragon creator god Io.
As a five-headed dragon, she is said to be in constant battle with her brother, Bahamut.
"Final Fantasy" also incorporates the multi-headed dragon version into their universe as well, making Tiamat one of the top-level bosses.
Although, as the franchise continued, she loses more and more heads.
If we look back at Tiamat's 11 monsters, it's possible to identify precursors to mermaids or sirens, the Minotaur, Bigfoot, or even whatever this is.
All the members of Tiamat's monstrous brood are meant to be frightening because of their animalistic qualities or inherent malice.
Unlike her other godly offspring, her monstrous children were formed independently, adding another threatening, mysterious layer to their existence.
Tiamat is both nurturer and destroyer, mother and monster, as she chooses.
After all, Tiamat and every god and monster she birthed offers a fitting Oedipal metaphor, fear that our creations could someday not only overshadow us It would be cool, right?
Eleven monsters.
That's my new theory.
