The Babylonian opens with the well-known motif of the primeval waters covering the world. Although this motif is very important in itself and in other cosmogonies of the Ancient Near East, it is not attested in identified Mesopotamian creation accounts older than and it can be found just in the old Babylonian divine name „Mother, creator of heaven and earth“, a byname of the goddess Namma, the personified ground waters. This paper provides a brief overview of the motifs of personified waters in Mesopotamian texts of the third and second millennia. The sources argue for the existence of a southern Mesopotamian tradition with the personified ground waters and a western tradition with the personified sea. These traditions were combined together in , where the male god Apsû embodied the ground waters Abzu/Apsû doesn’t appear to have been personified until the second half of the second millennium. The paper closes with a critique of Lambert’s etymology of the name Namma.