Titanomachy
Titanomachy and Gigantomachy are words used to describe the wars in Greek mythology between the Titans and the Giants against the Olympian gods. The wars are impressively described in Hesiod’s poem Theogony (Genealogy of the Gods)(b). In these conflicts, many writers have seen similarities with the war between the Athenians and the Atlanteans.
Peter James[047.193] has pointed to close parallels between Hesiod’s work and Hittite texts discovered in the 1940s. He quotes the mythologist, Joseph Fontenrose who commenting on the texts, declared that they made it impossible ‘to deny…..any genetic relation between Greek and Asiatic mythologies’. Claims of a direct Phoenician influence on Greek mythology have also been made(a).
J. V. Luce suggested[120] that Hesiod was prompted by the eruption of Thera, and its fallout, to write about the Titanomachy in his Theogony. Professor Mott Greene has fully supported this view[575], as do the husband and wife team of Elizabeth and Paul Barber in their important work on the transmission of myth[152]. The volcanologist Haraldur Sigurdsson, of the University of Rhode Island, is also convinced that the eruption had a major effect on Greek mythology inspiring both Hesiod’s long poem and the Atlantis story.
>Tim Wyatt has commented that “Greene does not consider the possibility that the Theogony may encapsulate an earlier eruption of Thera, i.e., that of Cape Riva, dated to about 21,000 ka by radiocarbon or an eruption of some other volcano in the Aegean arc whose signature may be similar enough to Hesiod’s chronology of events. But he does see that some of the weapons can refer to volcanic activity elsewhere in the Mediterranean, especially that of Etna.” (d)<
Professor Timothy John Burbery of Marshall University has just published his new book, Geomythology: How Common Stories Reflect Earth Events [1873]. In an August 2021 article, he supports the linkage of the eruption of Thera with the Titanomachy(c).
(a) https://phoenicia.org/greek.html
(b) https://www.greekmythology.com/Books/Hesiod-Theogony/hesiod-theogony.html
(d) https://ciesm.org/online/monographs/24/WM_24_119_130.pdf *