the enemy of order and good, and strove to
destroy the world.

I have seen
The ambitious ocean swell and rage and foam
To be exalted with the threatening clouds.[167]

Tiamat was the dragon of the sea, and therefore the serpent or
leviathan. The word "dragon" is derived from the Greek "drakon", the
serpent known as "the seeing one" or "looking one", whose glance was
the lightning. The Anglo-Saxon "fire drake" ("draca", Latin "draco")
is identical with the "flying dragon".

In various countries the serpent or worm is a destroyer which swallows
the dead. "The worm shall eat them like wool", exclaimed Isaiah in
symbolic language.[168] It lies in the ocean which surrounds the world
in Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek, Teutonic, Indian, and other
mythologies. The Irish call it "moruach", and give it a mermaid form
like the Babylonian Nintu. In a Scottish Gaelic poem Tiamat figures as
"The Yellow Muilearteach", who is slain by Finn-mac-Coul, assisted by
his warrior band.

There was seen coming on the top of the waves
The crooked, clamouring, shivering brave ...
Her face was blue black of the lustre of coal,
And her bone-tufted tooth was like rusted bone.[169]

The serpent figures in folk tales. When Alexander the Great, according
to Ethiopic legend, was lowered in a glass cage to the depths of the
ocean, he saw a great monster going past, and sat for two days
"watching for its tail and hinder parts to appear".[170] An
Argyllshire Highlander had a similar experience. He went to fish one
morning on a rock. "He was not long there when he saw the head of an
eel pass. He continued fishing for an hour and the eel was still
passing. He went home, worked in the field all day, and having
returned to the same rock in the evening, the eel was still passing,
and about dusk he saw her tail disappearing."[171] Tiamat's sea-brood
is referred to in the Anglo-Saxon epic _Beowulf_ as "nickers". The
hero "slew by night sea monsters on the waves" (line 422).

The well dragon--the French "draco"--also recalls the Babylonian water
monsters. There was a "dragon well" near Jerusalem.[172] From China to
Ireland rivers are dragons, or goddesses who flee from the well
dragons. The demon of the Rhone is called the "drac". Floods are also
referred to as dragons, and the Hydra, or water serpent, slain by
Hercules, belongs to this category. Water was the source of evil as
well as good. To the Sumerians, the ocean especiall