Battle Between Marduk and Tiamat, Neo-Assyrian Cylinder Seal. Marduk was the Babylonian name of a god from ancient Mesopotamia and patron deity of the city of Babylon, who, when Babylon became the political center of the Euphrates valley in the time of Hammurabi rose to the position of the head of the Babylonian pantheon. Tiamat was a chaos monster, a primordial goddess of the ocean. She is often described by as a sea serpent or dragon. The Tiamat myth is one of the earliest recorded versions of the Chaoskampf, the battle between a culture hero and a chthonic or aquatic monster, serpent or dragon. A civil war between the gods was growing to a climactic battle. The Anunnaki gods gathered together to find one god who could defeat the gods rising against them. Marduk, a very young god, answered the call and was promised the position of head god. To prepare for battle, he made a net to encircle Tiamat within it, gathers the four winds so that no part of her could escape, creates seven new winds, and raises up his mightiest weapon, the rain-flood. He challenges the leader of the Anunnaki gods, the dragon of the primordial sea Tiamat, to single combat and defeats her by trapping her with his net, blowing her up with his winds, and piercing her belly with an arrow.