Typhon, A Compendium of the Ancient Gods

Typhon was the youngest and most terrible son of Gaia, begotten by her on Tartarus after the defeat of her elder children the Titans, that she might have an avenger against Zeus. He was a creature of cosmic scale and form: his head reached the stars; his arms extended from east to west; from his shoulders sprouted a hundred dragon-heads, each of which spoke with a different voice (sometimes the voices of gods, sometimes of bulls and lions and snakes); from his thighs to his feet he was coiling serpents; flame shot from his eyes; his roaring was such that mountains shook and the waves of the sea rose up.

When he attacked Olympus, the gods at first fled in terror — most of them, in the Egyptian-influenced version of the myth preserved by Apollodorus, fleeing into Egypt and there hiding in the forms of various animals (and so, in this version, originating the animal-headed gods of the Egyptian pantheon, a piece of Greek anti-Egyptian mythography that should not be taken at face value). Zeus alone, with the help of Athena, stood his ground. The battle was titanic in scope: thunderbolts hurled at distances; the sea boiled; the earth was scorched; mountains were uprooted. At one stage Typhon caught Zeus, cut out the sinews of his hands and feet, and hid them in a cave on Mount Casius in Cilicia, leaving Zeus helpless in the cave under the guard of the dragoness Delphyne; Hermes and the goat-god Aegipan recovered the sinews and reattached them to Zeus, who renewed the battle. At length Zeus prevailed, hurling Typhon down with a great barrage of thunderbolts and crushing him under the bulk of Mount Etna in Sicily — which volcano's eruptions are, in the Greek imagination, Typhon's continuing struggles beneath the burden, his fiery breath escaping through the crater. The defeat of Typhon was the final establishment of Zeus's cosmic order; with it, the war of generations was at last complete.

Curator’s note

What the sources say, and what later tradition added. The sources for this bay

Hesiod, Theogony 820–880, is the principal source; Apollodorus 1.6.3 gives the elaborated narrative including the cutting of the sinews. The geographical localization beneath Mount Etna in Sicily is the standard Greek account; an alternative localization beneath the volcanic island of Ischia (the ancient Pithecusae) was held by some. The parallel between the Zeus-Typhon combat and the Hurrian Tarhunna-Illuyanka and Ugaritic Baal-Yam combats has been much explored in modern scholarship since Cyrus Gordon and Walter Burkert; direct or indirect Near Eastern influence on the Greek myth is widely accepted, with Typhon's Cilician geography (Cilicia having been an area of Hittite and Hurrian influence in the Bronze Age) suggesting transmission through Anatolia. The localization at Mount Casius in Cilicia further connects to the Ugaritic Baal-on-Mount-Sapan tradition (Volume I).

Kin in the sources

Each tie is quoted from the entry that states it.

Child ofGaiaTyphon was the youngest and most terrible son of Gaia, begotten by her on Tartarus
Child ofTartarusbegotten by her on Tartarus after the defeat of her elder children the Titans
Rival ofZeusthat she might have an avenger against Zeus
Slain byZeusAt length Zeus prevailed, hurling Typhon down with a great barrage of thunderbolts
Compared withIlluyankaThe parallel between the Zeus-Typhon combat and the Hurrian Tarhunna-Illuyanka and Ugaritic Baal-Yam combats
Compared withYamThe parallel between the Zeus-Typhon combat and the Hurrian Tarhunna-Illuyanka and Ugaritic Baal-Yam combats
Named as the same god asSetPlutarch calls him, identifying him with the Greek monster of disorder
Consort ofEchidnamate of Typhon and mother by him of most of the great monsters of Greek mythology
Parent ofCerberusHe was a son of Typhon and Echidna, brother of the Hydra and the Chimera
Parent ofSphinxThe genealogical connection of the Sphinx to Echidna and Typhon (Hesiod, Theogony 326) makes her a sister of the other great Greek monsters

The same god in other rooms

The ancient sources themselves name these as one god under different names. See Set and Typhon hung together

The Gift of the NileSet

When the sources speak

Dated witnesses for The Heroic Bestiary. A date marks when the evidence was written down, not when the belief began. The whole timeline

c. 1600–1100 BCE: Mycenaean palace tablets in Linear B record offerings and divine names, but little continuous myth.
c. 1100–800 BCE: Post-palatial oral traditions and changing cult landscapes precede the surviving alphabetic epics.
late 8th–7th centuries BCE: The Iliad, Odyssey, Hesiodic Theogony and Works and Days give influential but non-exclusive divine orders.
7th–6th centuries BCE: Homeric Hymns, lyric poetry, colonization, and local sanctuary traditions multiply regional narratives.
6th–5th centuries BCE: Orphic, Pythagorean, and mystery materials develop alternative cosmogonies and afterlife doctrines.
5th century BCE: Athenian tragedy and comedy recast heroic houses and divine justice for civic audiences.
4th century BCE: Philosophers, antiquarians, and local historians interpret or criticize inherited myth.
323–31 BCE: Hellenistic poets and scholars systematize variants across an enlarged Greek world.