7th century BCE

The 7th century BCE appears in Simone de Beauvoir’s history as the date of a written Assyro-Babylonian cosmology, not the time when the myth it recounts was first created. The account of Bel-Marduk’s defeat of Tiamat gives a vivid mythic form to the establishment of patriarchal order: a story of violent victory that, de Beauvoir argues, conceals a more gradual historical transition.

The dated cosmological text

De Beauvoir describes the surviving text as dating from the 7th century BCE while recounting a much older legend. It belongs to an Assyro-Babylonian cosmological tradition in which the Sun and the Sea, Aton and Tiamat, give birth to the celestial and terrestrial worlds and to the great gods. The date therefore marks the text’s historical setting as a document, not the origin of the events or ideas narrated within it.

Tiamat and the creation of order

In the legend, the first generations of gods become turbulent, and Aton and Tiamat decide to destroy them. Tiamat, the woman-mother, leads the struggle against Bel-Marduk, one of her descendants. He challenges her, kills her, and divides her body: one part becomes heaven, the other the foundation of the earth. He then orders the universe and creates humanity. The narrative turns the defeat of a maternal figure into an account of how a male power establishes cosmic order.

Myth and patriarchal authority

De Beauvoir places this account beside the Greek drama of Orestes and Clytemnestra, in which the son kills his mother and is acquitted. Both myths represent patriarchal supremacy through a son’s triumph over maternal authority; in the Babylonian story, creation itself follows the destruction of the mother figure. De Beauvoir reads such legendary victories as expressions of a social order in which men claimed the roles of subject, lawgiver, and creator, while women were assigned a subordinate position.

That symbolic reading does not mean that historical change occurred through a single decisive battle. De Beauvoir explicitly distinguishes the mythic drama from the transition to paternal rights, which she describes as gradual. The legends’ importance lies instead in how they give violent, memorable form to the idea that male rule had defeated an older maternal order. Their dramatic opposition between feminine chaos and masculine order makes a political hierarchy appear cosmic and inevitable.

Significance of the date

The 7th-century-BCE text serves as evidence for the circulation and preservation of a myth through which patriarchal authority could be imagined as the foundation of the world. Its date anchors the written account without collapsing the much older legend into that period. In de Beauvoir’s analysis, the distance between historical process and mythic representation matters: a gradual change in social rights is recast as a definitive victory, and the resulting story helps make male supremacy seem natural rather than historically produced.