Tiamat

In ancient Mesopotamian religion, Tiamat is the cosmic ocean that mates with Abzû, the groundwater, to produce the Babylonian pantheon in the creation myth recorded in the Enūma Eliš ("When on High").

Tiamat is referred to as a woman, and has – at various points in the epic – a number of anthropomorphic features such as breasts and theriomorphic features such as a tail.

In the Enūma Eliš, written in the 2nd millennium BCE in Lower Mesopotamia in the Babylonian variety of the Akkadian language, Tiamat gives birth to the first generation of deities after mingling her waters with those of Apsû. The gods continue to reproduce, forming a new and noisy mass of divine children. Apsû, driven to violence by the noise they make, seeks to destroy them but is slain. Enraged, Tiamat wages war upon the children who killed him, 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. Enki's son, the storm-god Marduk, eventually defeats her, but not before she conjures forth monsters whose bodies she fills with "poison instead of blood". Marduk dismembers her and constructs the elements of the cosmos from the parts.