The Enūma Eliš, as we've seen, is a foundational myth in Mesopotamian culture. Tiamat as a central character fills the role as the mythical mother of gods and monsters, an avenging wife, and a monster herself, as tempestuous as the seas which she represents. While there isn't much scholarly debate over what Tiamat actually is (as a goddess and a creature representing saltwater), when you get into the specifics of what she looks like, things get a bit more muddy.
We do not have any truly "original" depictions of Tiamat from when the Enūma Eliš was written or even from Mesopotamia (the images we do have are below and were found to be from around the same time during the Neo-Assyrian Empire), and the Enūma Eliš itself is loose on specific details outside of the generic inclusion of things like “a head” and “entrails” in her description. But later depictions show her as a serpent or a "dragon," alternative translations even calling her such.
Here's one where she has many different animals
making her up, like a lion, an eagle, horns, and snake parts.
A relief from the palace of Ashurbanipal from the 860 BCE
This depiction is believed to be a seal showing the defeat of
Tiamat, and will be the image I focus on the most (she's the long one)
Dragons, though, are ill-defined. What a dragon is can be different depending on what time and in what culture you ask the question. Early Jewish apocalypse tales featured Behemoth and Leviathan, monstrous beings of primordial chaos like Tiamat that opposed YHWH and could have very well been called draconic. The Greek drakon (one who looks/stares) was a large, serpent-like creature that guarded different things, like the Drakon Ismenios, which guarded a sacred spring of Ares near Thebes. This idea of a dragon was later subsumed into Old English culture, where dragons (draca), described as wyrms or serpents, hoarded treasure and would fight heroes to defend it, like is seen in the dragon that slew Beowulf with its venomous bite. But if you look further east, dragons were water spirits in most of East and Southeast Asian myth, and were highly intelligent, shapeshifting, snake-like beings that controlled the rain.
Check the snakeyness on this Ismenios bad boy!
Pictures taken moments before disaster (ft. Beowulf)
A long lad from the Qing Dynasty
All this to say that the only unifying factor between all these mythic dragons is being vaguely snakey, and even that was a stretch with some of the other animals thrown into Mesopotamian “dragons” like lions or eagles. What we would consider now as a Western dragon (or as I once heard it, a dinosaur with wings) didn’t appear until 1260 C.E. in the medieval bestiary, MS Harley 3224.
The original Western Winged Dragon
in the MS Harley 3224 bestiary
An interesting thing, though, is how Tiamat has been repurposed by modern Western culture, where we have re-applied our modern definitions of a dragon to her early depictions and characterization. If we look at how Tiamat was originally thought of, she was destructive and chaotic, but not evil. She was a mother and suffered the tragic deaths of her first and second husband, and was driven to destruction because of that loss and grief. She is Marduk’s adversary, but she is also his grandmother, and through her defeat, she created the rest of the world: the land and sky from the two halves of her body, the Tigris and Euphrates from her tears, the mountains from her breasts, etc. Tiamat is a swirling mass of destruction and creation, and is more complicated than good or evil.
Some of the Enūma Eliš tablets!
D&D's version of Tiamat...she's definitely had a makeover
The wide reach of D&D on the modern fantasy landscape has led to other Tiamat depictions, some close to this reimagining, others departing to make her a breasty anime girl who can shoot lasers out of her hands. But each version clings very closely to the idea that the original Tiamat was a dragon like we think of them in the West today, wings and all. It’s my belief that even if Tiamat was the mother of the modern-day dragon, she and her original depictions should not be forgotten. She should be remembered in all her snakey, weird metaphorical glory, vague descriptions and all.
And if Mesopotamian myth is to be believed, this is Tiamat's world, and we're just living on it. Maybe it's best not to upset her by messing with her look.
And now, here's some examples of modern Tiamats that I had to look at while trying to find images for this blog post! Now you have to look at them too :)
I'll give it points for including the feathers,
feet, and saltwater epithet, but what on Earth
is going on with the head...
What in the... Ya know, 0 points.
-20 points.
-1000 points.
I do not like it.
They turned her into a Funko Pop. This is a dark day.
I'm actually ok with this one. At least they got the ocean
in there, that's honestly good enough for me at this point.
Thanks for reading!
Also, here's an aside to talk about Satan for a sec:
If Europeans took the ideas of big snakes and turned them into dragons, and Satan’s first appearance in the Bible was as the serpent that tricked Adam and Eve into consuming the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, why hasn’t Satan taken the form of a dragon in the wider Christian mythos today? Sure the Middle Ages had depictions of him as a draconic-ish creature at times, but I want a Game of Thrones style dragon Satan to have his own story. Give me the Paradise Lost cultural fanfic that canonizes Dragon Satan. I’ll be waiting.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiamat
https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Tiamat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_dragon#:~:text=MS%20Harley%203244%2C%20a%20medieval,a%20fully%20modern%2C%20western%20dragon.
https://www.theoi.com/Ther/DrakonIsmenios.html#:~:text=THE%20DRAKON%20ISMENIOS%20(Ismenian%20dragon,monster%20with%20a%20heavy%20stone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dragon_(Beowulf)#:~:text=The%20Beowulf%20dragon%20is%20described,vengeful%2C%20fire%2Dbreathing%20creature.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eXAPwjASEQ
http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/amgg/listofdeities/tiamat/index.html#:~:text=Tiamat%20is%20a%20personification%20of,in%20the%20En%C5%ABma%20Eli%C5%A1%20TT%20.
Enuma Elish
https://www.ancient-origins.net/myths-legends-asia/tiamat-mesopotamia-0010565
