[Illustration: between Marduk (Bel) and the Dragon. Drawn from a
bas-relief from the Palace of Ashur-nasir-pal, King of Assyria,
885-860 B.C., at Nimrud. [Nimrud Gallery, Nos. 28 and 29.]]

At this point a new Text fills a break in the First Tablet, and
describes the fight which took place between Nudimmud or Ea, (the
representative of the established "order" which the rule of the gods had
introduced into the domain of Apsu and Tiamat) and Apsu and his envoy
Mummu. Ea went forth to fight the powers of darkness and he conquered
Apsu and Mummu. The victory over Apsu, i.e., the confused and boundless
mass of primeval water, represents the setting of impassable boundaries
to the waters that are on and under the earth, i.e., the formation of
the Ocean. The exact details of the conquest cannot be given, but we
know that Ea was the possessor of the "pure (or white, or holy)
incantation" and that he overcame Apsu and his envoy by the utterance of
a powerful spell. In the Egyptian Legend of Ra and Aapep, the
monster is rendered spell-bound by the god Her-Tuati, who plays in it
exactly the same part as Ea in the Babylonian Legend.

When Tiamat heard of Ea's victory over Apsu and Mummu
she was filled with fury, and determined to avenge the death
of Apsu, her husband.

The first act of TIAMAT after the death of Apsu was to increase the
number of her allies. We know that a certain creature called
"UMMU-KHUBUR" at once spawned a brood of devilish monsters to help her
in her fight against the gods. Nothing is known of the origin or
attributes of UMMU-KHUBUR, but some think she was a form of TIAMAT. Her
brood probably consisted of personifications of mist, fog, cloud, storm,