Tiamat is the common transcription of a name generally and more correctly read as Tiamtu. The meaning of this word is “the sea,” and its later and more decayed pronunciation is _tâmtu_ or _tâmdu_, the feminine _t_ having changed into _d_ after the nasal _m_, a phenomenon that also meets us in other words having a nasal before the dental. As this word is the Tauthé of the Greek writer Damascius, it is clear that in his time the _m_ was pronounced as _w_ (this peculiarity is common to the Semitic Babylonian and Akkadian languages, and finds its converse illustration in the provincialism of _mir_ for _wir_, “we,” in German), though the decayed word _tâmtu_ evidently kept its labial unchanged, for it is difficult to imagine _w_ changing _t_ into _d_, unless it were pronounced in a way to which wee are not accustomed. We have here, then, an example of a differentiation by which one and the same word, by a change of pronunciation, forms two “vocables,” the one used as a proper noun and the other—a more decayed form—as a common one. Tiamtu (from the above it may be supposed that the real pronunciation was as indicated by the Greek form, namely, Tiauthu), meaning originally “the sea,” became then the personification of the watery deep as the producer of teeming animal life such as we find in the waters everywhere. Dominating and covering at first the whole earth, it was she who was the first producer of living things, but when the land appeared, and creatures of higher organization and intelligence began, under the fostering care of the higher divinities, to make their appearance, she saw, so the Babylonians seem to have thought, that with the advent of man, whom the gods purposed forming, her power and importance would, in a short time, disappear, and rebellion on her part was the result. How, in the Babylonian legends, this conflict ended, the reader of the foregoing pages knows, and after her downfall and destruction or subjugation, she retained her productive power under the immediate control and direction of the gods under whose dominion she had fallen. Tiamtu is represented in the Old Testament by _tehôm_, which occurs in Gen. i. 2, where both the Authorised and Revised Versions translate “the deep.” The Hebrew form of the word, however, is not quite the same, the Assyrian feminine ending being absent.