In the Thrakian and Thessalian tradition, the Titans were portrayed as a barbarous tribe of giants who made war on the gods. They were almost indistinguishable from the Thrakian Gigantes of Pallene. These barbarian gods once snuck into Olympos, their faces smeared with with white chalk (titanos), and seized the child Zagreus who was seated on the throne. Certain local landmarks on the mountainous borders of Thessalia and Thrake were apparently identified with this Titan-story: including the river Titaressos whose murky waters were said to be drawn from the infernal Styx, and Mount Titanos or Titarios opposite Olympos whose deposits of white-chalk gypsum were the Titans' disguise.
The individual Titans also turn up in the guise of obscure local gods with minor cults in the regions of central and southern Greece.
Some of the Titans were also apparently gods of foreign import: Atlas and the fire-stealing Prometheus, for example, were frequently associated with the Anatolian kingdom of Lydia.
The cosmic story of five Titans - four holding the corners of heaven - may be Phoenician in origin. Late Greek writers also equated the Titans with Set, enemy of the god-king Osiris in Egyptian myth.
"You remember only one deluge, though there have been many...
You and your fellow citizens are descended from the few survivors that remained, but you know nothing about it because so many succeeding generations left no record in writing. The change in the rising and setting of the sun and the other heavenly bodies, how in those times they used to set in the quarter where they now rise, and used to rise where they now set...
Of all the changes which take place in the heavens this reversal is the greatest and most complete ..There is at that time great destruction of animals in general, and only a small part of the human race survives." - Critias by Plato 360 B.C.E
