Samizdat

“Merodach advances to the fight armed with a club and bow which Anu had placed in his hand and which subsequently became a constellation, as well as with his own peculiar weapon which hung behind his back. It was shaped like a sickle, and is the αρπη or khereb with which Greek mythology armed the Asiatic hero Perseus.

The struggle was long and terrible. Tiamat opened her month to swallow the god, but he thrust a storm-wind down her throat, and the monster was burst asunder, while her allies fled in terror before the victorious deity.

The combat is represented in stone in one of the Assyrian bas-reliefs now in the British Museum. There we can see the demon as she appeared to the Assyrians, with claws and wings, a short tail, and horns upon the head.

Battle between Marduk (Bel) and Tiamat. Drawn from a bas-relief from the Palace of Ashurbanipal, King of Assyria, 885-860 B.C., at Nimrûd.
British Museum, Nimrûd Gallery, Nos. 28 and 29.
http://bharatkalyan97.blogspot.com/2013/06/tablet-of-destinies.html

When we remember the close parallelism that exists between this conflict of Merodach with Tiamat, and the war recorded in the Apocalypse between Michael and “the great dragon,” it is difficult not to trace in the lineaments of Tiamat the earliest portraiture of the mediaeval devil.”

A.H. Sayce, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by the Religion of the Ancient Babylonians, 5th ed., London, 1898, p. 102.