“... Several aspects of this wider culture as filtered through the Babylonians shed new light on the elusive tale of the seven-headed demon in B. Kiddushin 29b. Ancient Mesopotamian mythological accounts tell of a primordial battle between the gods that led to the creation of a mythic seven-headed snake warrior. According to the Babylonian epic of creation, the Enuma Elish, written during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar I (r. c. 1125–1104 BCE), it was the goddess Tiamat who sought to destroy the gods who killed her husband. To build her army, Tiamat created eleven monsters, one of which was the Mušmaḫḫu, a giant serpent with seven heads. Though the other gods defeated Tiamat and her army in battle, the text suggests that the gods did not destroy the Mušmaḫḫu, but rather preserved it in some form in the primordial deep. In older Sumerian texts, the war-god Ninurta is described as vanquishing “the seven-mouthed mušmah serpent” and hanging its body from the “shining cross-beam” of his chariot. Sumerian and Akkadian visual images of Ninurta depict him using some sort of weapon to battle the beast. This idea was not exclusive to ancient Mesopotamia. To the west in Ras Shamra, in what is now northern Syria, the Ugaritic Baal Cycle also describes a series of battles between the gods. In a number of places, the goddess Anat declares, [...] Seven-headed serpents were a common ancient Near Eastern image, but not a late antique Zoroastrian one. The figure had a long afterlife in Babylonian and Semitic cultures. ...”