The Cult
No one ever sacrificed to Tiāmat. No temple, altar, festival or priesthood bearing her name is attested anywhere in the cuneiform record: the primordial sea was a theological figure, constructed and contemplated by the scholar-priests of Babylon rather than worshipped by the populace. Her nearest approach to a liturgy was the annual recitation of the Enuma Elish at the Akitu New Year festival, when Marduk's combat and creation were performed before the city. Lexical lists and god lists register her as Apsû's consort and the gods' ancestress, while diviners kept her name alive in the ordinary vocabulary of salt water, tiāmtu. The cultic world otherwise passed her by: cities built their temples to Marduk, who conquered her, not to the mother he conquered. Any worship of Tiāmat is modern — a devotional current of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries without ancient warrant, however moving its reclaiming of the defeated mother.