Her severed body became the sky and the earth, her tears the Tigris and Euphrates, her tail the Milky Way. This episode treats the Babylonian goddess Tiamat as a biographical subject, following her arc through the Enuma Elish from peaceful cosmic saltwater ocean to grieving widow to vengeful mother of monsters to the defeated giant whose corpse was recycled into the universe.

We explore how her name connects to the Akkadian word for sea, the Greek thalassa, and the Hebrew tehom of Genesis, and how the real halocline near Bahrain, where fresh aquifer water bubbles into the Persian Gulf, gave ancient observers a living image of Tiamat and Abzu mingling. Then we cover Abzu's murderous noise complaint, Enki's preemptive strike, Kingu and the Tablet of Destinies, Marduk's winds, and the Chaoskampf pattern that repeats from the Hittites to Apollo ...