Let us now turn to the poem in which the combat between Tiamat and Marduk forms the principal feature.  For some unexplained reason Tiamat rebels against the gods.  Collecting her hosts, among them frightful demon shapes of all imaginable forms, she advances for the purpose of expelling the gods from their seats.  The affrighted deities turn for protection to the high gods, Anu and Ea, who, however, recoil in terror from the hosts of the dragon Tiamat.  Anshar then applies to Marduk.  The gods are invited to a feast, the situation is described, and Marduk is invited to lead the heavenly hosts against the foe.  He agrees on condition that he shall be clothed with absolute power, so that he shall only have to say “Let it be,” and it shall be.  To this the gods assent:  a garment is placed before him, to which he says “Vanish,” and it vanishes, and when he commands it to appear, it is present.  The hero then dons his armor and advances against the enemy.  He takes Tiamat and slays her, routs her host, kills her consort Kingu, and utterly destroys the rebellion.  Tiamat he cuts in twain.  Out of one half of her he forms the heavens, out of the other half the earth, and for the gods Anu and Bel and Ea he makes a heavenly palace, like the abyss itself in extent.  To the great gods also he assigns positions, forms the stars, establishes the year and month and the day.  At this point the history is interrupted, the tablet being broken.  The creation of the heavenly bodies is to be compared with the similar account in Gen. i.; whether this poem narrates the creation of the rest of the world it is impossible to say.

In this history of the rebellion of Tiamat against the gods we have a mythical picture of some natural phenomenon, perhaps of the conflict between the winter and the enlivening sun of summer.  The poem appears to contain elements of different dates.  The rude character of some of the procedures suggests an early time:  Marduk slays Tiamat by driving the wind into her body; the warriors who accompany her have those composite forms familiar to us from Babylonian and Egyptian statues, paintings, and seals, which are the product of that early thought for which there was no essential difference between man and beast.  The festival in which the gods carouse is of a piece with the divine Ethiopian feasts of Homer.  On the other hand, the idea of the omnipotence of the divine word, when Marduk makes the garment disappear and reappear, is scarcely a primitive one.  It is substantially identical with the Biblical “Let it be, and it was.”  It is probable that the poem had a long career, and in successive recensions received the coloring of different generations.  Tiamat herself has a long history.  Here she is a dragon who assaults the gods; elsewhere, as we have seen, she is the mother of the gods; here also her body forms the heaven and the earth.  She appears in Gen. i. 2 as the Tehom, the primeval abyss.  In the form of the hostile dragon she is found in