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Iraq: Marduk, sun god of Babylon, with his thunderbolts pursues Tiamat after the latter stole the Tablets of Destiny. Nineveh, c. 700 BCE

Iraq: Marduk, sun god of Babylon, with his thunderbolts pursues Tiamat after the latter stole the Tablets of Destiny. Nineveh, c. 700 BCE

In Mesopotamian Religion (Sumerian, Assyrian, Akkadian and Babylonian), Tiamat is a chaos monster, a primordial goddess of the ocean, mating with Abzû (the god of fresh water) to produce younger gods.

Marduk was the Babylonian name of a late-generation god from ancient Mesopotamia and patron deity of the city of Babylon, who, when Babylon became the political center of the Euphrates valley in the time of Hammurabi (18th century BCE), started to slowly rise to the position of the head of the Babylonian pantheon, a position he fully acquired by the second half of the second millennium BCE.