Evidence dossier: Tiāmat
Evidence dossier 255 — Tiāmat. Every exhibit catalogued, every ruling stated with its grounds.
At a Glance
- Canonical form: Tiāmat
- Original script: 𒀭𒋾𒊩𒆳
- Pantheon: Mesopotamian
- Convention: Assyriological transliteration — š, ṣ, ṭ, ḫ as the sign lists require
- False forms on record: 1
- Contested forms: none attested
- Series: The Canonical Register, No. 255 of 287
The Evidence
Exhibit 1 — the attestation. The attested form is 𒀭𒋾𒊩𒆳, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Tiāmat.
Exhibit 2 — the preserved marks. a → ā (Long vowel). Each is verifiable against the sources named in the attestation.
Exhibit 3 — the flattened form. The plain form tiamat is not false — it is a fallback, and the register is exact about what that means. In systems that cannot carry diacritics (legacy databases, older tooling, parts of the address-bar pipeline) the flattened form is the accepted vehicle, and the rulebook names it explicitly as the final rung of the fallback hierarchy: full restoration first, circumflex where attested, macron-only by the academic standard, an attested variant, and only then plain ASCII.
What the fallback status forbids is promotion: tiamat may carry the name where marks are impossible, but it may not represent the name where marks are possible. Every mark it drops — a → ā — is a fact the sources recorded. A fallback is a vehicle, never the primary.
Exhibit 4 — struck from the record: Tiamat. Origin: the publisher compromise — older books and hurried websites that print the "English equivalent" as if it were the name itself. Grounds: every substitution here (ā→a) is a romanization of convenience, not an attested spelling — it teaches the reader to guess, not to read.
Exhibit 5 — the physical record. Archaeological evidence for Tiāmat centers on cuneiform copies of the Enuma Elish from Nineveh, Sippar, Babylon, and Assur, where the myth of Marduk's defeat of Tiāmat was recited at the New Year (Akitu) festival. The Babylonian Esagila temple and its ziggurat Etemenanki embodied the cosmic order established by Marduk's victory. Representations of chaos dragons and composite monsters in glazed bricks, cylinder seals, and reliefs — notably from the Ishtar Gate at Babylon — give visual form to the creatures born from Tiāmat's body.
Exhibit 6 — the continuing record. The image of a cosmic sea-monster split to create the world has never lost its power. It appears in biblical creation hymns that depict God dividing the sea and crushing Leviathan (Psalm 74, Psalm 89, Job 26), in medieval maps that place dragons at the edges of the known world, and in modern geology's recognition that Earth's water and land are products of ancient cataclysms.
The Convention's Own History
Cuneiform writes a consonant inventory English does not have: š, ṣ, ṭ, ḫ mark sibilants and stops that Akkadian and Sumerian distinguished and meaning depends on — the difference between 'sun' and 'son' is exactly one ṣ. Assyriological transliteration (the sign lists of Borger and the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary) settled those marks over the last century and a half, and the register keeps them because dropping them merges gods, cities, and concepts that the tablets keep apart.
The Protocol's Position
Can the canonical form live in the address bar? Almost always, yes. IDNA 2008 admits every mark this register defends — the DNS stores them as `xn--` punycode and modern browsers render them natively. The real frictions are practical, not legal: some registrars stock only part of the IDN space, so a theoretically valid name can be temporarily unbuyable; and stacked combinations (an acute riding a macron) remain awkward to type on mobile keyboards even where the protocol accepts them.
The project's answer is a ranked ladder, not a compromise: the full restoration first, then attested fallbacks in descending order of completeness. The ladder's lowest rung, plain ASCII, is a vehicle for legacy systems — sanctioned, but never presented as the scholarly form.
The Verdict
Case closed on Tiāmat: canonical, cited, and defended. The keyboard form tiamat rides as the sanctioned fallback — and stays in that lane. The register's files remain open: if a source surfaces that changes any line of this entry, the entry changes. Until then, the temple at /sites/tiamat/ holds the canonical form.
The docket for this ruling: 1 false form ruled against, Tiamat first on the docket; 1 preserved mark verified: a → ā; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 8 cited sources — Enuma Elish, CAD (Chicago Assyrian Dictionary), ETCSL (Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature).
The Register Continues
The register holds 287 entries like this one — each temple with its own ruling. Read the temple's founding dispatch for the story, its Restoration File for the philology, its Resonance File for the industries, or the whole archive end to end.
Continue the register — previous entry: Ḏḥwty (read it) · next entry: Tiān (read it).
The Canonical Register is written from the same canonical record as the lexicon itself. If a false form is missing from this page, it is because the evidence does not support calling it false — or because we have not seen it yet. Show us, with a citation, and the register will answer.