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In Mesopotamian Religion (Sumerian, Assyrian, Akkadian and Babylonian), Tiamat is a primordial goddess of the ocean, mating with Abzû (the god of fresh water) to produce younger gods. She is the symbol of the chaos of primordial creation, depicted as a woman, she represents the beauty of the feminine, depicted as the glistening one. It is suggested that there are two parts to the Tiamat mythos, the first in which Tiamat is a creator goddess, through a "''Sacred marriage''" between salt and fresh water, peacefully creating the cosmos through successive generations. In the second "''Chaoskampf''" Tiamat is considered the monstrous embodiment of primordial chaos. Some sources identify her with images of a sea serpent or dragon.〔Such as 〕 In the ''Enûma Elish'', the Babylonian epic of creation, she gives birth to the first generation of deities; her husband, Apsu, (correctly) assuming they are planning to kill him and usurp his throne, later makes war upon them and is killed. Enraged, she, too, wars upon her husband's murderers, taking on the form of a massive sea dragon, she is then slain by Enki's son, the storm-god Marduk, but not before she had brought forth the monsters of the Mesopotamian pantheon, including the first dragons, whose bodies she filled with "poison instead of blood". Marduk then forms heavens and the earth from her divided body. Tiamat was later known as Thalattē (as a variant of ''thalassa'', the Greek word for "sea") in the Hellenistic Babylonian writer Berossus' first volume of universal history. It is thought that the name of Tiamat was dropped in secondary translations of the original religious texts (written in the East Semitic Akkadian language) because some Akkadian copyists of ''Enûma Elish'' substituted the ordinary word for "sea" for Tiamat, since the two names had become essentially the same due to association.〔Jacobsen 1968:105.〕 ==Etymology== Thorkild Jacobsen〔 and Walter Burkert both argue for a connection with the Akkadian word for sea, ''tâmtu'', following an early form, ''ti'amtum''.〔Burkert, Walter. ''The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influences on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age'' 1993, p 92f.〕 Burkert continues by making a linguistic connection to Tethys. He finds the later form, ''thalatth'', to be related clearly to Greek ''Θάλαττα'' (thalatta) or ''Θάλασσα (thalassa)'', "sea". The Babylonian epic ''Enuma Elish'' is named for its incipit: "When above" the heavens did not yet exist nor the earth below, Apsu the freshwater ocean was there, "the first, the begetter", and Tiamat, the saltwater sea, "she who bore them all"; they were "mixing their waters". It is thought that female deities are older than male ones in Mesopotamia and Tiamat may have begun as part of the cult of Nammu, a female principle of a watery creative force, with equally strong connections to the underworld, which predates the appearance of Ea-Enki.〔Steinkeller, Piotr. "On Rulers, Priests and Sacred Marriage: tracing the evolution of early Sumerian kingship" in Wanatabe, K. (ed.), ''Priests and Officials in the Ancient Near East'' (Heidelberg 1999) pp.103–38〕 Harriet Crawford finds this "mixing of the waters" to be a natural feature of the middle Persian Gulf, where fresh waters from the Arabian aquifer mix and mingle with the salt waters of the sea.〔Crawford, Harriet E. W. (1998), ''Dilmun and its Gulf Neighbours'' (Cambridge University Press).〕 This characteristic is especially true of the region of Bahrain, whose name in Arabic means "two seas", and which is thought to be the site of Dilmun, the original site of the Sumerian creation beliefs.〔Crawford, Harriet; Killick, Robert and Moon, Jane, eds.. (1997). ''The Dilmun Temple at Saar: Bahrain and Its Archaeological Inheritance'' (Saar Excavation Reports / London-Bahrain Archaeological Expedition: Kegan Paul)〕 The difference in density of salt and fresh water drives a perceptible separation. ''Tiamat'' also has been claimed to be cognate with Northwest Semitic ''tehom'' (תהום) (the deeps, abyss), in the Book of Genesis 1:2.〔Yahuda, A., ''The Language of the Pentateuch in its Relation to Egyptian'' (Oxford, 1933)〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Tiamat」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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