In the Enuma Elish, Tiamat, who as Nammu in Sumer had represented the essential feminine birthing power of the universe, becomes a female monster to be destroyed.

Her defeat and the rise of Marduk signals a basic change in the mythology of Mesopotamia and the view of reality it represented. From a system based on the necessity of fertility and female power, the balance moves to a sense of necessary patriarchal order and power centered in one city and its all-powerful deity.