Leadership and Digital Change The

Digitalization Paradox Einar Iveroth

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/leadership-and-digital-change-the-digitalization-parad
ox-einar-iveroth/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Digitalization Of Society And Socio-Political Issues 1:

Digital, Communication And Culture Éric George

https://textbookfull.com/product/digitalization-of-society-and-
socio-political-issues-1-digital-communication-and-culture-eric-
george/

Digitalization Of Society And Socio■Political Issues 2:

Digital, Information And Research Éric George

https://textbookfull.com/product/digitalization-of-society-and-
socio%e2%80%90political-issues-2-digital-information-and-
research-eric-george/

Evolving Digital Leadership James Brett

https://textbookfull.com/product/evolving-digital-leadership-
james-brett/

Leadership for a Better World Understanding the Social

Change Model of Leadership Development Nclp

https://textbookfull.com/product/leadership-for-a-better-world-
understanding-the-social-change-model-of-leadership-development-
nclp/
Coercion and the Nature of Law First Edition Kenneth
Einar Himma

https://textbookfull.com/product/coercion-and-the-nature-of-law-
first-edition-kenneth-einar-himma/

Digital Transformation Now!: Guiding the Successful

Digitalization of Your Business Model 1st Edition
Daniel R. A. Schallmo

https://textbookfull.com/product/digital-transformation-now-
guiding-the-successful-digitalization-of-your-business-model-1st-
edition-daniel-r-a-schallmo/

Law As An Artifact Kenneth Einar Himma

https://textbookfull.com/product/law-as-an-artifact-kenneth-
einar-himma/

School Leadership and Educational Change in Singapore

1st Edition Benjamin Wong

https://textbookfull.com/product/school-leadership-and-
educational-change-in-singapore-1st-edition-benjamin-wong/

Educational Leadership Improvement and Change Discourse

and Systems in Europe Lejf Moos

https://textbookfull.com/product/educational-leadership-
improvement-and-change-discourse-and-systems-in-europe-lejf-moos/
Leadership and Digital Change

Digitalization is on everyone’s lips as new technology changes business

landscapes and conventional companies are outperformed by younger
digital and agile contestants. In this volatile environment it seems more
relevant than ever before to understand the aspects and business logic
behind the elusive phenomenon called “digitalization”. Never before
have there been such great opportunities to unleash the full potential
of technology within organizations to create long-standing competitive
advantage. This book explains the strategy and practice of how to
lead and control the people side of digital change in a dynamic world
of uncertainty and social complexity, and as such the book snares the
elusive phenomena of digitalization.
Digitalization drives behavioral change and calls for a new way of
thinking among senior executives. In practice, reaping the benefits of
digital technology is not as easy as it first appears to be. This book provides
a map to navigate in the volatile business landscape where change occurs
continuously because of digital technology. It provides an historical frame
of the evolution of digital technology, decodes digitalization’s negative
influence on the external aspects of customer satisfaction, discusses and
explains the strategic and leadership consequences of different forms of
digital change, and finally demonstrates how leading digital change can
be put into practice. Illustrative case studies and examples are provided
throughout, as well as models and frameworks.
This is a valuable resource for researchers, academics, and students in
the fields of organizational studies, organizational change, technology
and innovation management, and digitalization.

Einar Iveroth is Associate Professor in Business Studies at Uppsala

University, Sweden.

Jacob Hallencreutz, Ph.D., is Group CEO of EPSI Rating Group,

Stockholm, Sweden.
Routledge Studies in Organizational
Change & Development
Series Editor: Bernard Burnes

Reconsidering Change Management

Applying Evidence-Based Insights in Change Management Practice
Steven ten Have, Wouter ten Have, Anne-Bregje Huijsmans, and
Maarten Otto

Rethinking Culture
Embodied Cognition and the Origin of Culture in Organizations
David G. White, Jr

Academic Practitioner Research Partnerships

Developments, Complexities and Opportunities
Edited by Jean Bartunek and Jane McKenzie

The Social Psychology of Change Management

Theories and an Evidence-Based Perspective on Social and
Organizational Beings
Steven ten Have, John Rijsman, Wouter ten Have and Joris Westhof

Organization Development and Society

Theory and Practice of Organization Development Consulting
Baruch Shimoni

Reshaping Change: A Processual Perspective, 2nd Edition

Patrick Dawson

Changing Change Management: Strategy, Power and Resistance

Darren McCabe

Leadership and Digital Change

The Digitalization Paradox
Einar Iveroth and Jacob Hallencreutz

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/

Routledge-Studies-in-Organizational-Change-Development/book-series/
SE0690
Leadership and Digital
Change
The Digitalization Paradox

Einar Iveroth and Jacob Hallencreutz

First published 2021
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 Taylor & Francis
The right of Einar Iveroth and Jacob Hallencreutz to be identified
as author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance
with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-27501-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-29642-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents

List of Figures and Tablesvi

Acknowledgmentsvii
Prefaceviii

1 Introduction 1

2 Putting Digitalization in Perspective 9

3 Understanding the Customer Side of Digital Change 43

4 The Swedish Potato: A Story of a Transformation 69

5 Strategic Aspects of Digital Change 81

6 The Employee Side of the Digital Change 105

7 Summary and Final End Notes 135

Index140
Figures and Tables

Figures
2.1 Six Stages of Organizational Learning 14
2.2 Four Waves of Organizational Learning 17
3.1 General Customer Satisfaction Trend 45
3.2 The EPSI Model 54
3.3 The Latent Variables’ Relative Importance on Customer
Satisfaction Over Time 56
5.1 The Digitalization Map89
5.2 The Strategic Continuum of Digital Change 97

Tables
1.1 Major Digital Change Challenges 5
2.1 Models of Creative Accumulation and Creative
Destruction28
3.1 Items From Questionnaire Connected to the EPSI Model 67
6.1 The Commonality Framework for Digital Change 108
6.2 Hard and Soft Factors of Digital Change 122
6.3 The Framework Applied to the Potato Story 126
Acknowledgments

We are grateful to FEI Research Institute for their keen interest in our
research, as well as their financial support. Also, this book would not
have been possible without our continuous discussions we have had with
colleagues and their respective organizations over recent years. There-
fore, we are deeply indebted to our friends and colleagues at Uppsala
University, CASIP, Swedish Institute for Quality (SIQ), and EPSI Rating
Group, especially our Chief Analyst Dr. Johan Parmler.
The greatest and most loving thanks to our families, especially Jean-
ette, Sofie, Eije, and Dorothea. Thank you for putting up with us, espe-
cially since the finalizing of the book took place during a very chaotic
time due to the Coronavirus. Without you, none of this would have hap-
pened. Finally, a special acknowledgment and love to Sofie, who in an
apartment in Dalston in London came up with the innovative idea of
connecting digital change to something as rudimentary as a potato!
Preface

After finalizing our previous Routledge book, Effective Organizational

change (2015), we have been out there researching and lecturing about
how to prevail in a time of uncertainty and rapid change. The audience
has been both students, research fellows, consultants, and leaders from
different industries. The change challenges are many, but over the last
years it has been obvious to us that the word digitalization is on every-
one’s lips. And this is understandable. The development of digital services
has skyrocketed during that last five years. Services from almost all soci-
etal sectors and industries are today available around the clock via digital
platforms, literally just a smartphone away. Changed internal as well
as external demands, needs, and expectations have come consequently.
Therefore, it is fair to say that handling digital change is one of today’s
great management challenges. Yet many leaders fumble in the dark when
going from theory to practice. To reap the full benefits of digital tech-
nology is not that easy as it first appears to be. There are for sure text-
books that cover models, concepts, and ideas about how to master digital
change, but real life has always been less clear cut. Far too many digital
change initiatives go awry despite good intentions and plans.
During our meetings, seminars, and discussions with friends we have
shared many experiences from our craft of doing research and lead
change in practice. In our conversations one notion has been standing
out; society as we know it is on the brink of a transformation that will
change almost everything: what we do, how we do it, and what to do—
due to digitalization. It is fair to say that organizations in all industries
and societal sectors across the globe struggle with digital change. But
the word digitalization as such is too often used as a label for almost
any change initiative, project, or undertaking where computers and
information technology to some extent are involved. When looking
closer there seems to be no clear-cut definition of the word and what it
means in practice. Rather, digitalization is used to describe a wide range
of change challenges, from disruptive transformations of whole indus-
trial sectors to simple launches of apps, web applications, or internal
process adjustments. There seems to be widespread confusion, and we
 Preface ix
feel that digitalization is used as a remedy for almost any internal or
external development need. Moreover, the customers’ perceptions of
the outgrowth of all these new digital services are not always positive.
We call this development the emergence of the digitalization paradox—
digital services have come closer and are available around the clock, but
personal relations seem to have gone astray in the process. Therefore,
it is more relevant than ever before to understand the aspects, as well
as business logic, behind the elusive phenomenon that everyone talks
about. There is a plethora of books on how to go about digitalization
challenges, mainly written from a technology perspective. But successful
digital change is less about technology per se and more about people and
new ways of thinking, feeling, and doing. Success lies in the people side
of change. And that is what this book is about.
Leadership and Digital Change: The Digitalization Paradox uncov-
ers what it is that leaders actually do when they lead digital change. By
doing so, the book provides the frontline of digitalization research for
researchers and graduate students, while at the same time informing
leaders of what they can do to excel in their digital change efforts. The
book combines a theoretical overview, models, and conceptual discus-
sions with rich cases from the field. Most importantly, the book extends
earlier work by presenting the Digitalization Map and the Commonality
Framework of Digital Change.
But . . . having written all these nice words, we feel obliged to add
a final personal note. During the finalization of this work, the Covid-
19 pandemic hit the world and the gap between a textbook and reality
suddenly became painfully clear. We are now in the middle of a societal
change that cannot be fully grasped. There is also an awkward irony
to this crisis; Covid-19 is right now accelerating digital change in many
societies, when physical interactions in haste turn digital in all corners
of the world. So, in a somewhat uncomfortable sense, this book is more
relevant than ever.
Take care of each other, wherever you are.
1 Introduction

One night in January, we were having yet another discussion about the
design of this book. The debate took place in Jacob’s kitchen and was
quite tiresome. To get a breath of fresh air and hopefully find some clarity
we decided to take a walk around the lake (Jacob lives in Mölnbo, a small
rural village about 60 km southwest of Stockholm). Halfway around the
lake, we decided to stop at the farm Bergholm and say hello to Mauritz
and Sanne, Jacob’s neighbors and close friends. Einar was getting cold
and perhaps they could offer some warm refreshments. And yes, they
were welcoming as always. While sipping on our drinks (now in their
kitchen), we all noticed a small truck that entered the farm and parked
in Mauritz and Sanne’s courtyard. Time was about 8 pm and it was pitch
black outside. Who was that? Burglars? Mauritz looked out the window
and said relaxed “oh . . . the food is coming”. The intruder turned out to
be their weekly delivery of groceries from one of the internet supermar-
kets. While Mauritz collected the bags and chitchatted with the driver,
Sanne explained:

We buy almost all foodstuffs online. So handy and convenient. As

you can see, they deliver literally at our doorstep and we don’t have
to spend time at shopping malls or supermarkets just to get our
weekly need of groceries. So easy, just a couple of clicks away. And
the drivers are usually nice and service minded. They even find the
way out here in the lonely woods. Of course, they know nothing
about the details of the stuff they deliver so, if something is missing,
or if some foodstuffs have a poor quality it is a drawback. That is of
course easier to handle face to face in a supermarket.

We looked at each other and nodded. Ok, here was our introduction to
the book.
This short vignette is merely one example of how the delivery of prod-
ucts and services has changed significantly during the last decades due
to advances in technology, and information technology in particular.
For some, such a delivery of goods and services might seem as a simple
2 Introduction
transaction performed in another way compared to earlier. Nothing
more. However, behind all this lies a great organizational challenge both
from an external perspective concerning the on-going relationship with
customers, and from an internal perspective when it comes to changing
organizational structures, processes, and people. More specifically, we
find that this vignette from everyday life touches upon many of the key
aspects of this book. Externally, the experience in Mauritz and Sanne’s
kitchen underlines the notion that for many new technology has become
something that is just taken for granted—smartphones, apps, and good
connectivity are no-brainers. The technology is simply not important for
the end-user; instead the prime focus is the services that are available and
enabled by digital technology. For an organization, this translates into
external challenges to establish, uphold, and improve the customer rela-
tionship and satisfaction through different forms of digital interfaces and
channels, as well as through the less digital truck driver.
Internally, the vignette shows that new technology transforms organi-
zations, industries, and societal sectors (in this example the logistic
implications for the value chain of grocery shopping) from the customer
interface through ordering, packaging, and distribution. The shelves in
the shop are substituted by a webpage and a warehouse. The cashier in
the supermarket is substituted by a truck driver. For an organization,
this translates into internal challenges of making sure that the correct
strategic decisions are aligned with the continuous development of digital
technology and assure that technology is used in the organization in the
right way, at the right time, and for the right purposes. On top of this,
the internal and external challenges influence each other, as customer
feedback should drive the development of digital technology as well as
organizational change.
More broadly, the story visualizes that digitalization in practice often
is about down to earth behavioral change for both the customer as well
as for employees. The option to buy groceries online triggers new cus-
tomer behavior, and demand for new ways of working within the retail
industry come consequently. The story also touches a phenomenon that
we call the digitalization paradox: services come closer and are avail-
able around the clock, but at the same time the distance to personal and
customized relations increases. And to complicate things further, digital
services available from one industry are soon expected from other totally
different industries, so this expectation spillover accelerates societal
change. Digitalization breeds changes to industries, complete systems,
and society at large. In this way, digitalization—which is what this is all
about—comprises individual, organizational, social, and societal change
that organizations and their leaders must manage and control.
Looking around we see that the word digitalization is on everyone’s
lips. And this is understandable. Services from almost all societal sectors
are available around the clock via digital platforms and are literally just a
 Introduction 3
smartphone away. New customer interfaces, combinations of goods and
services, and internal as well as external demands, needs, and expecta-
tions come in the wake. Never have service providers had the potential to
be close to customers and users via new digital interfaces. Big data create
opportunities to understand and meet different needs with customized ser-
vices. And never have there been such great opportunities to unleash the
full potential of technology within organizations to create long-standing
competitive advantage. Yet many organizations and leaders fumble in the
dark when going from such rhetoric to reality. In practice, reaping the
full benefits of digital technology is not that easy as it first appears.
In our dialogues with senior managers, there is often a notion that
society as we know it is standing on the brink of a major transformation
that literally will change almost everything: what we do, how we do it,
and what to do—due to digital technology. The extent to which such
opinions (about the real and future transformational nature of technol-
ogy) are true or not is too early to tell. What we can say, however, is that
we are now experiencing a societal change at large. And this profound
societal change is not only about new technology. Political instability,
barriers to trade, nationalism, and protectionism seem to characterize the
global agenda, and the collective capacity of the international community
to address fundamental societal problems has become weaker, and the
global world as such seems fragile.
This also applies to organizational life. A stressful working life reduces
well-being and job health and produces work environment challenges in
several social sectors. Add to this a public conversation and discourse
where alternative facts and “fake news” have almost become a new
norm. Who should you believe in? Who is right? How to do everything?
Technology has since industrialization been a driver for societal devel-
opment and the birth of new products and services. Through history,
new technology has created customer value on its own merits. However,
today intangible organizational assets such immaterial, intellectual, and
human capital are becoming increasingly important for organizational
performance in the eyes of the customers.
It is fair to say that organizations in all industries and societal sectors
across the globe struggle with digital change. And the word digitaliza-
tion is nowadays used as a label for almost any change initiative, project,
or undertaking where computers and information technology to some
extent are involved. However, when looking closer there seems to be no
clear-cut definition of the word and what it means in practice. Rather,
digitalization is used to describe a wide range of change challenges—from
disruptive transformations of whole industrial sectors to simple launches
of apps, web applications, or internal process adjustments. While writing
this book, it has become clear to us that there is a widespread confusion
that digitalization these days is used as a remedy for almost any internal
or external development need. Therefore, it is more relevant than ever
4 Introduction
before to understand the aspects, as well as business logic, behind the
elusive phenomenon that everyone talks about. There is a plethora of
books on how to go about digitalization challenges, mainly written from
a technology perspective. But successful digital change is less about tech-
nology per se and more about people and new ways of thinking, feeling
and doing. Success lies in the people side of change. And that is what this
book is about.
To clarify from the start: our guiding definition in this book is that digi-
talization is a transformational term that refers to the individual, social,
organizational, and societal implications that come out of the diffusion
and adoption of new information technology (Iveroth et al., 2018).
And this rapid development is not just affecting service organizations.
Manufacturing companies nowadays need to offer additional services,
or integrated product-service solutions, in addition to, or instead of,
their traditional offerings in order to stay innovative and meet demands,
needs, and expectations posed by competition from lower cost economies
(Lightfoot et al., 2013; Oliva and Kallenberg, 2003; Stauss et al., 2010).
This change is often in the literature referred to as servitization, a term
coined in 1988 by Vandermerwe and Rada (1988). Servitization has been
described as “a business-model change and organizational transforma-
tion from selling goods to selling an integrated combination of goods and
services” (Bustinza et al., 2015, p. 53). In this way, the environment in
which both private and public organizations are operating is changing at
an accelerating speed, with trends such as servitization and digitalization
at the forefront (Coreynen et al., 2017).
As a response to changes in the external environment and an attempt
to increase the understanding of customer behavior, concepts such as cus-
tomer journey (Richardson, 2010) and co-creation of value (Lenka et al.,
2017; Payne et al., 2008) have been adopted to understand customers
perception of a particular product, service, or brand. In service industries
and service research fields, these external, customer-focused concepts have
been discussed for years (Galvagno and Dalli, 2014; Halvorsrud et al.,
2016). Manufacturing organization and industries were late adopters but
have today more attentiveness towards these elusive customer-focused
concepts by offering services and integrated product-service solutions
triggered by both digital technology and customer demand (often having
consequences for their whole organization and business model). There is
also a growing interest within the public sector to focus on “services-to-
customers” and get feedback from different societal stakeholders. And all
this is catalyzed and accelerated by new digital technology.
As we hinted in the beginning of this chapter, the overarching digitali-
zation challenge is twofold: there are both external customer challenges
as well as internal organizational challenges to consider. When approach-
ing the external customer side of digitalization, we should first digest
one crucial observation from our own research: customer satisfaction in
 Introduction 5
Swedish industries has decreased since 2010 (Hallencreutz and Parmler,
2019). This research will be thoroughly discussed in Chapter 3, but what
we see is that digitalization affects consumer behavior and customers’
demand, needs, and expectations. And customers’ perception of this out-
burst of new digital services is not always positive. This is linked to what
we earlier referred to as the digitalization paradox—digital services come
closer and are available around the clock, but personal relations seem to
go astray in the process. And this paradox is a critical aspect to consider,
since our recent research also shows that the ability to provide personal
and proactive service is a much stronger driver for customer satisfaction
compared to product features. Our conclusion is that we—managers,
consultants, and researchers—must be much more aware of the organi-
zational consequences of these somewhat paradoxical collective changes
in customer behavior that have emerged through digitalization.
However, when approaching the internal organizational and employee
side of digitalization, we see other challenges. The management of the
relationship and interaction between the customer and the organization
breeds and translates into encounters that lie inside the organization. If
we are set out to abridge the digitalization paradox, then we must not
only understand the digitalization process connected to relationships
with customers but also understand how to lead, manage, and control
digital technology within the organization. This is crucial since these
internal processes provide the very foundation of delivering the value
proposition to the customer in the first place. This is by no means trivial,
and in fact, this has less to do with technology per se and more about
how to change our own behavior. For example, IBM (2008; Jørgensen
et al., 2009) conducted a study of digital change projects based on face-
to-face interviews and surveys with over 1500 practitioners worldwide.
Their research suggests that the soft factors are becoming increasingly
important. More precisely, and as Table 1.1 illustrates, the study shows

Table 1.1 Major Digital Change Challenges

Changing mindsets and attitudes (soft factor) 58%

Corporate culture (soft factor) 49%
Complexity is underestimated (soft factor) 35%
Shortage of resources (hard factor) 33%
Lack of commitment of higher management (soft factor) 32%
Lack of change know how (hard factor) 20%
Lack of transparency because of missing or wrong information 18%
(hard factor)
Lack of motivation of involved employees (soft factor) 16%
Change of process (hard factor) 15%
Change of IT systems (hard factor) 12%
Technology barriers (hard factor) 8%
Source: Adapted from IBM, 2008, p. 12; Jørgensen et al., 2009, p. 40
6 Introduction
that in digital change projects, hard and tangible issues of digital technol-
ogy are not the main concern (such as change of IT-systems and dealing
with technological barriers). These are not the winning criteria in manag-
ing digital change. Instead, it is the soft factors of managing people and
their behavior, motivation, attitude, culture, and mindset. These factors
are also the most difficult to get right.
The IBM study also concluded that a common denominator among
successful organizations is that they distinguish themselves by treating
the management of digital related change as a core competence and
nurture it as a professional discipline. These companies have developed
tools, models, and processes for managing the soft issues of organiza-
tional change. More recent studies (see, e.g.: Cascio and Montealegre,
2016; Södergren, 2018; World Economic Forum, 2016) not only confirm
such notions but also contend that stronger focus on soft factors might be
even more important today and in the near future. For example, the com-
prehensive report from World Economic Forum (2016, p. 22) in Davos
about the effects of digitalization argues that:

Overall, social skills—such as persuasion, emotional intelligence and

teaching others—will be in higher demand across industries than
narrow technical skills, such as programming or equipment opera-
tion and control. . . . Cognitive abilities (such as creativity and math-
ematical reasoning) and process skills (such as active listening and
critical thinking) will be a growing part of the core skills require-
ments for many industries.

We might offer world class technical solutions and flawless internal

change processes, but if we fail in handling the soft immaterial aspects
from the customers perspective, we will leave the customer with an
awkward feeling of being neglected, forgotten, and perhaps not seen as
important. And if we have blind faith towards structures and technology
without acknowledging employees and their behavior, the digital change
will go astray and ultimately fail. Overall, our guiding principle in this
work is that there is a tension between technology, organization, and
customer as their development is out of step with each other. Roughly
put, it takes a while for the organization and its people to catch up with
technological changes, while customers might embrace the new much
faster and put pressure on from the outside. One of the purposes and
contributions of this book is to illustrate these tensions and discuss how
we can synchronize them and make them work and develop in tandem.
This book focuses on the people side of digitalization. The idea behind
it is that organizations in general should improve their ability to under-
stand, lead, manage, and empower people in such ways that they at least
to some extent keep up with the perceived societal changes out there,
catalyzed by digitalization. We start this journey with the subsequent
 Introduction 7
chapter that provides an historical overview of the evolution of informa-
tion technology (IT) during the last 60 years as well as examine the differ-
ent ways technology and organization have been studied. The purpose is
to provide a frame and background for later arguments and discussions.
Then in Chapter 3, we will approach the current digital change from the
outside by discussing the on-going transformation of customer demands,
needs, expectations, and behaviors, supported by results from decades of
quantitative market research.
After this we will travel back to 18th-century Sweden in the subse-
quent Chapter 4. There we will visit the Andersson family, who is strug-
gling with potato cultivation. This chapter is composed of a fictional
story about how potato production transformed the lives of a family in
a small parish in Småland. This historical odyssey visualizes how a new
revolutionary farming technology once changed the world and functions
as an analogy for technological change. The later chapters of the book
will refer back to the story in order to highlight different important facets
of change and explain the plethora of its adjacent leadership and man-
agement choices, activities, and strategies.
Then in Chapter 5 we will move back to current times and go inside
the organization and discuss different strategic approaches to digital
change. This includes The Digitalization Map that explains that there are
four different kinds of digital changes that necessitates their respective
ways to strategies, control, communicate, and lead. Then the following
Chapter 6 will be more practice oriented as the chapter explains what
it is that leaders actually do when they lead employees and the whole
organization through a digital change. This will be done by presenting
The Commonality Framework for Digital Change that communicates the
different activities, leadership roles, and resources that are at play during
such a change. We finish off with a last chapter that wraps up and sum-
marizes the main points of the book.
Now let us in the next chapter begin by looking in the rearview mirror
and see how digitalization has developed across time and what we can
learn from this. We do so because the understanding of current digital
challenges can become deeper if we understand the legacy of digitaliza-
tion, and the historical lessons that it yields, and such insights of the past
can translate into better decisions, choices, and actions.

References
Bustinza, Bigdeli, Baines & Elliot (2015). Servitization and competitive advan-
tage: The importance of organizational structure and value chain position,
Research-Technology Management, 58(5), pp. 53–60.
Cascio & Montealegre (2016). How technology is changing work and organi-
zations, Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational
Behavior, 3(March), pp. 349–375.
8 Introduction
Coreynen, Matthyssens & Van Bockhaven (2017). Boosting servitization through
digitization: Pathways and dynamic resource configurations for manufactur-
ers, Industrial Marketing Management, 60(January), pp. 42–53.
Galvagno & Dalli (2014). Theory of value co-creation: A systematic literature
review, Managing Service Quality, 24(6), pp. 643–683.
Hallencreutz & Parmler (2019). Important drivers for customer satisfaction—
from product focus to image and service quality, Total Quality Management &
Business Excellence (March), pp. 1–10.
Halvorsrud, Kvale & Følstad (2016). Improving service quality through customer
journey analysis, Journal of Service Theory and Practice, 26(6), pp. 840–867.
IBM (2008). Making change work. Continuing the enterprise of the future con-
versation (IBM: IBM Global Services).
Iveroth, Magnusson & Lindvall (2018). Digitalisering och styrning (Lund:
Studentlitteratur).
Jørgensen, Owen & Neus (2009). Stop improvising change management! Strat-
egy & Leadership, 37(2), pp. 38–44.
Lenka, Parida & Wincent (2017). Digitalization capabilities as enablers of value
co-creation in servitizing firms, Psychology & Marketing, 34(1), pp. 92–100.
Lightfoot, Baines & Smart (2013). The servitization of manufacturing: A system-
atic literature review of interdependent trends, International Journal of Opera-
tions & Production Management, 33(11–12), pp. 1408–1434.
Oliva & Kallenberg (2003). Managing the transition from products to services,
International Journal of Service Industry Management, 14(2), pp. 160–172.
Payne, Storbacka & Frow (2008). Managing the co-creation of value, Journal of
the Academy of Marketing Science, 36(1), pp. 83–96.
Richardson (2010). Using customer journey maps to improve customer experi-
ence, Harvard Business Review, 15(1), pp. 2–5.
Södergren (2018). Förändringsförmåga, in: Iveroth, Lindvall & Magnusson (Eds)
Digitalisering och styrning, pp. 383–409 (Lund: Studentlitteratur).
Stauss, Nordin & Kowalkowski (2010). Solutions offerings: A critical review
and reconceptualisation, Journal of Service Management, 21(4), pp. 441–459.
Vandermerwe & Rada (1988). Servitization of business: Adding value by adding
services, European Management Journal, 6(4), pp. 314–324.
World Economic Forum (2016). Global challenge insight report: The future of
jobs employment, skills and workforce strategy for the fourth industrial revo-
lution. Available from: http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs.
pdf [Accessed 2020–02–24].
2 Putting Digitalization
in Perspective

Introduction
This chapter provides an historical and theoretical background to the
evolution and adoption of information technology (IT)1 that gives a con-
text and frame for later parts of this book. The historical background
starts by defining and conceptualizing digitalization—a word often used
without a clear meaning. Then follows and historical overview where
we first reflect upon older forms of IT and then explain six forms of
organizational learning that an organization goes through when appro-
priating digital technology. The later parts of the historical background
are composed of a description of four waves of digitalization from the
middle of the last century until today. These different waves explain
how digital technologies have evolved from being large and standalone
units that enabled automation to the more present forms that have the
potential to transform organizations, markets, and societies. Particular
attention is paid to organizational consequences of the advancement of
digitalization as well as discussion of current trends. The second part
of the chapter explores the three different types of theoretical streams
that have been used in studies of technology and organizing during the
last 60 years: Technology imperative, Organizational imperative, and
Entanglement-in-practice perspective. These three different theoreti-
cal lenses afford three different rationales of how technology influences
change and organizing. Now let us begin by exploring the main theme of
the book: digitalization.2

Conceptualizing Digitalization
The words “digit” and “digitization” come from the Latin term “digi-
tus”, which means finger or toe. Originally this was connected to figures
and the activity of counting numbers, as a hand or a foot can come in
handy in such actions (Cöster and Westelius, 2017; Ong, 1995). Today
the term Digitization has a similar connotation since it refers to the
10 Putting Digitalization in Perspective
conversation process of transforming analog data3 into digital data.4
Google books’ scanning of physical into digital books is an illustrative
example of this process. Digitalization, however, is a more transforma-
tional term as it refers to the individual and social, organizational, and
societal implications that come out of digitization (Iveroth et al., 2018b).
Since computers and digital systems are now increasingly interconnected,
it opens for transformational change at all the three levels—individual,
organizational, and societal.
Historically, technology-enabled change that influences these three
levels is nothing new. There have been a number of dominant technolo-
gies across time that have had a similar transformational effect and have
amounted into different industrial revolutions:

• The first industrial revolution took place in late 18th century and was
the outcome of steam and waterpower and mechanical production.
• The second revolution was in the late 19th century propelled by elec-
tricity, mass production, and division of labor.
• The third industrial revolution of the 1960s was enabled by electron-
ics, IT, and automated production.

Currently there are many that argue that we are now facing a fourth
industrial revolution (also referred to as industry 4.0) because of digi-
talization (see, e.g.: Archibugi, 2017; Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2017;
Iveroth et al., 2018b; Lasi et al., 2014; Schwab, 2015; World Economic
Forum, 2016). There are, and has been for some time, several aspects
that have contributed to this development. For instance, Lasi and his col-
leagues (2014) argue that there are both pull and push triggers that lie in
the foreground of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR):
The pulling triggers include demands for shortened development and
innovation periods in organizations; increased individualization where
the customer sets higher demands for tailored products and services
(“batch one size”); new customer demand, needs, and expectations;
higher flexibility in organizations and production; quicker decision
making processes through decentralization and flattened organizational
structures; and finally, resource efficiency because of shortage, ecological,
and sustainability factors.
The push triggers are composed of the development of now com-
monly used technologies such as computers, smartphones, software
applications, and 3-D printers. On a higher level the push triggers also
include: increased automation and mechanization that enables robots
to support physical work; “smart factories” or “autonomous manufac-
turing cells” where work and decisions are decentralized to computers
and robots; miniaturization of computers into a small number of cubi-
cal centimeters.
 Putting Digitalization in Perspective 11
At the same time, there are arguments raised that digitalization is more
of a hyperbole with little effect in comparison to earlier industrial revolu-
tions (for further discussion and examples, see, e.g.: Boyd and Holton,
2018; Cetri Magazine, 2017; Peters, 2017; Poole, 2017). One argument
is, for example, that digitalization is just a natural extension of the third
industrial revolution that was enabled by IT and electronics.
One strong advocate for the 4IR is the economist Klaus Schwab (2016,
p. 3), founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum.
According to him, there are three distinct reasons for why digitalization
is indeed a new industrial revolution:

Velocity: Contrary to the previous industrial revolutions, this one is

evolving at an exponential rather than linear pace. This is the result of
the multifaceted, deeply interconnected world we live in and the fact
that new technology begets newer and ever more capable technology.
Breadth and depth: It builds on the digital revolution and com-
bines multiple technologies that are leading to unprecedented para-
digm shifts in the economy, business, society, and individually. It is
not only changing the “what” and the “how” of doing things but
also “who” we are.
Systems Impact: It involves the transformation of entire systems,
across (and within) countries, companies, industries and society as a
whole.

We concur with Schwab and similar arguments—undeniably digitaliza-

tion will have profound effect on all levels of society. However, if you
reflect over Schwab’s text (2016) you will notice a somewhat simplis-
tic tone at the same time as he ignores making reference to other work
being done on the same or similar subject within most scientific disci-
plines. One good reason for doing so is that from a historical point of
view the 4IR can give great “promise or potential peril” (Schwab, 2016,
p. 8) for nation-states, organizations, and human kind as such. Most
likely Schwab’s intention was to communicate such a message in a clear
and easy way in order to create a new mindset and increased awareness
for policy makers, governments, business leaders, and civil society. This
becomes clearer if we consider later work (Schwab and Davis, 2018)
where there are a more grounded connection to a variety of 4IR’s com-
plexities and challenges, such as security, integrity, medical applications,
lack of political will, asymmetrical distribution of power, inadequate
institutions, and so forth.
Schwab’s worries are warranted. On the one hand, and with the
right mindset, knowledge, and empowerment, 4IR has the potential
to significantly improve for example working conditions, company
growth, income levels, all aspects of sustainability, and quality of life for
12 Putting Digitalization in Perspective
humanity. On the other hand, there are a great number of inherent risks
with 4IR. For instance, the revolution can create significant inequality if
only a selected few companies and governments master the innovations
and technology of 4IR. Another possible scenario is that a large part of
the lower-skilled working force is replaced by automation and robotics.
In addition, unemployment can also increase because the new jobs that
4IR do create may require higher levels of education and specializa-
tion skills. What can also happen is that the mix of increased global
internet connection and increased unemployment and inequality creates
fragmented societies, extremism, and civil disorder and unrest. Such a
negative spiral of development can also be propelled forward by fake
news and deliberate disinformation. The outcome of the 4IR and how
it will affect nations, organizations, and people is too early to tell, and
many questions will remain unanswered for quite some time. However,
what we do know is that what happens tomorrow, and how 4IR will
play itself out connects directly to the decisions and actions made today.

Historical Overview of Digitalization

Earlier Forms of IT
One important departure point for describing the historical develop-
ment of digitalization is to shortly reflect over its core and foundation:
IT. Originally, we developed this technology to help us managing and
dealing with all sorts of information and data. Generally, IT has the main
purpose of facilitating us with: writing down and decontextualize infor-
mation, storing the information, (often) transporting the information,
and then finally decoding it in such a way that it is comprehendible at the
other end in order to make some sort of a decision.
Therefore, IT is by no means a new thing, and most civilizations across
history have had their own way of dealing with this problem. About
5000 years ago the Sumerians had their cuneiform that was written down
on clay tablets, the Incas had their khipu that was knots on a string, the
Egyptians had their hieroglyphs, and different forms of tally sticks were
used in the UK and other places in Europe. In most cases these forms of
technologies were developed for the purpose of keeping track of records,
taxes, military information, and calendrical information (Cöster and
Westelius, 2017). Other examples of information technology inventions
that made a stronger imprint on our own society are the alphabet, Morse
code, and the telegraph.
These forms of IT have across time struggled with the same problem:
contextualization. All of them have tried to develop different systems,
standards, routines, educational systems, and so forth to make sure that
information is encoded on the one end, and that it is decoded on the
 Putting Digitalization in Perspective 13
other end in as much similar manner as possible. Modern forms of IT are
no exceptions, as Kallinikos notes (2001, p. 62):

The information that computer-based systems generate is often

decontextualised, i.e., it has been taken away from the context that
it now describes or refers to. However, in order to be interpreted,
information must be re-contextualised, i.e., the context to which it
refers must be reconstructed in the minds of the people that deal with
this information.

Even in our globalized world, the management issues that arise are
in many cases not necessarily connected to technological problems.
Instead, management and control problems with digital technology
are often about making sure that the context at both the sender and
receiver end are similar. As Brown and Duguid (2001, p. 204) ele-
gantly explain:

as technologies increasingly allow people to communicate across

space and time, as knowledge is disembedded in one place to be re-
embedded in another, the critical question concerns the degree to
which the embedding conditions at both ends of the communication
are similar. To the extent that they are, then communication and
coordination are likely to be successful. To the extent that they differ,
communication and coordination are likely to break down.

One notable difference with more modern forms of IT is that it has

transcended limitations of space and time in an increasing rate. For
example, Morse code, together with the telegraph, enabled information
to be transported with the speed of eight words per minute from the
U.S. to the UK in the late 19th century. This revolutionary technology
enabled companies to be dispersed across the globe; for example Morse
code and the telegraph was one of the cornerstones in the British Empire.
Eventually the telegraph was replaced by other IT innovations such as
the telephone and radio that opened for transmitting information even
quicker and across greater geographical distances.
Such forms of technology were based on analog and mechanical-
electronic technology, and it was not until the 1950s that research and
experimentation with digital based technology began. The military and
larger organizations (e.g., IBM and Bell Labs) and universities primarily
drove this research forward. However, these early attempts of digitiza-
tion were performed in isolation as they did not have any major influ-
ence on society at large. And it is not until recently that digitalization
has had a more profound effect on individuals, organization, wider sys-
tems, and society.
 14 Putting Digitalization in Perspective
But let us stay in the middle of the last century to see if we can make
some historical lessons from earlier attempts of digitalization. One way to
do so is through Richard Nolan’s stages theory of IT and organizational
learning (Nolan, 1973, 1979, 2000).5 This is a normative geared theory
but suits us well here since it illustrates how IT and digitalization have
developed across the last 60 years and how such development influences
organizations and organizing. The theory serves several insights that can
be of value for discussion and understanding of the current problems and
opportunities of digitalization.

Six Stages of Organizational Learning

The stage theory proposes that since the 1950s, the assimilation of IT
in the organization can be illustrated as six stages of organizational
learning that together forms an S-curve—see Figure 2.1. These stages
are composed of: Initiation, Contagion, Control, Integration, Data
Administration, and finally Maturity—see Figure 2.1.6 According to the
ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING

Contagion Integration Maturity

Data
Initiation Control Administration
TIME

Figure 2.1 Six Stages of Organizational Learning

Source: Adapted from Friedman, 1994, p. 137; King and Kraemer, 1984, p. 467; Lyytinen,
1991, p. 94; Nolan, 1973, p. 401
 Putting Digitalization in Perspective 15
theory, organizations go through these stages when they try to adopt a
new technology.
In the first stage of Initiation the organization is, with caution, making
limited investment in a new technology. Controlled experiments and tri-
als are performed, and the aim is to prove and understand its potential
value for the organization. In most cases, the experiments are performed
by one or a few departments or functional areas, senior management is
less involved, and there is a lack of clear connection to overall direction
or strategy.
The second stage is termed Contagion, and here there is a higher degree
of organizational learning compared to the earlier stage (given that the
organization has not abandon the new technology altogether in the Ini-
tiation stage). Trials and experiments are performed in an uncontrolled
manner, technology is used ineffectively, and there is a high degree of
slack. Senior management is now fully dedicated to the new technology
as they promote its use and incorporate it in the organization’s strategy.
There is great demand for the new technology and there is a widespread
fear that the organization will be outmatched by competitors if they do
not master the technology as soon as possible (and hence the label con-
tagion). The stage often ends with a crisis with runaway budgets and
users as well as managers being less happy, frustrated, and exhausted
(Grégoire and Lustman, 1993).
The uncontrolled growth and ultimately inefficiency in the Contagion
stage amounts into a situation where management tries to gain greater
control of the developments before it escalates (Nolan, 2000)—and this
is the third stage of Control. In this stage growth, organizational learn-
ing, and slack decrease and efficiency and control increase. The new
technology is centralized and formalized and problems with technical
malfunctions as well as overspending from earlier stage are addressed.
There are also efforts of standardization, and more attentiveness is paid
to the people working with the technology rather than the technology
itself (by, e.g., professionalization).
In the fourth stage of Integration, there is a balance between control
and growth, and different independent and disparate systems are inte-
grated. The technology is now more reliable and delivers a high-quality
service to its users. The standardization process that began in earlier
stages continues even further. The accumulated learning from earlier
stages results in users being more knowledgeable than earlier and capa-
ble of using the technology. Therefore they also become the main driving
force for development instead of technology-specialist (Friedman, 1994).
As illustrated in Figure 2.1, it is in this stage that a competing technology
often is introduced, as there is an overlap of S-curves.7
The next stage is referred to as Data administration, and here atten-
tion is paid towards the data and information that comes out of the
16 Putting Digitalization in Perspective
technology rather than the technology in itself. Data and information
are considered being a greater strategic resource compared to earlier. In
this phase, the use of the technology becomes more seamless and is one
important enabler for many processes within the organization. There is
also tight control of the resources spent on the technology, and control-
ling and steering committees are often used. Top management are actively
involved and they view the technology as one central part for achieving
strategic objectives by, for example, integrating suppliers and customers
(Favaretto, 2015). At the same time, and as illustrated by overlaps of
S-curves in Table 2.1, another technology (or several technologies bat-
tling dominance?) is on the rise.
In the last stage of Maturity, the technology mirrors the organiza-
tion and its information flows, and the IT is embedded in every part
of the organization. The technology is matured and contributes sig-
nificantly to the effectiveness and efficiency of the organization. The
technology is increasingly being used for forecasting and future plan-
ning and the management control is used to its full extent. The role of
the technology shifts from being one part of achieving strategic objec-
tives into being a significant key-enabler for attaining full competitive
advantage.
Overall, central to all the six stages of organizational learning is the
notion of resource slack. Across time there is often a high degree of
resource slack in the first three faces (i.e., Initiation, Contagion, and Con-
trol) and a stronger degree of control in the remaining stages where the
users are to a greater extent held accountable for technology expenditure
(Lyytinen, 1991; Mahmood and Becker, 1985). When there is a slack of
resources, this often translates into learning and experimentation activi-
ties that nurture innovation. However, such activities are actively dis-
couraged and restricted in the later stages. The willingness to invest in the
current technology is limited in later stages but at the same time organi-
zation that aims to progress to the next S-curve have to provide resource
and slack to the emerging technology (i.e., the overlap of the different
S-curves in Figure 2.2).

Four Waves of Digitalization

So, the six stages (that amounts into an S-curve) constitute the different
phases of learning that the organization goes through when adopting a
new technology. Now, if we zoom out and examine the development
of digital technology since the 1960s, there have been four different
S-curves: Data Processing (DP) wave, Desktop wave, Network wave (the
first three waves are mainly based on the work of Nolan, 2000; Nolan
and Bennigson, 2003), and Cyber-physical wave, as illustrated in Fig-
ure 2.2. Let us start with going through the first DP wave.
 Putting Digitalization in Perspective 17

Cyber-Physical
wave
ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING

Network
wave
Desktop
wave

DP
wave

1960 1975 1980 1995 2010 2015

Figure 2.2 Four Waves of Organizational Learning

Source: Extended and adapted from Favaretto, 2015, p. 25; Nolan, 2000, p. 332; Nolan
and Bennigson, 2003, p. 3

DP Wave
The DP wave started approximately in the beginning of the 1960s and
ended around the 1980s. During this time, the dominating technology
was mainly composed of centralized standalone mainframe computers,
and the organizations often had a multidivisional functional hierarchi-
cal structure. Roughly put, centralized big computers aiding big and
centralized organizations. The users of IT were in most cases engineers
or scientist that used the technology for scientific purposes or managers
and administrators that used IT for commercial purposes. In this wave
technology played an automating role (Zuboff, 1988) by automating
advanced mathematical calculations for scientists, for instance. Or aiding
managers and administrators in running of their large organizations more
efficiently by, e.g., automating payrolls and attentiveness of customer
payments. The technology was viewed as “big and large machines”, and
this was mostly because that was what they were: you went to a large
room where the machine was located and there you put in information in
the form of a punched card to enable advanced calculations.
The control and management of the DP computers was handled by
a so-called DP manager. These individuals were often seen as having a
command-and-control style of managing and exercising a “benevolent dic-
tatorship” (Nolan, 2000, p. 346). With the support of higher management
their main purpose was to use the technology to support the organization
current and traditional way of doing business—avoiding experimenting
18 Putting Digitalization in Perspective
with the technology to explore new innovative ways to do business (Nolan,
2000; Nolan and Croson, 1995).
One important actor in this wave was IBM. In the early 1950s the
company started to produce computers for commercial use. For example,
in the 1950s you could lease the successful IBM 650 for about $3250 that
could help you with programming, modulation, and calculation (Nolan,
2000). For several decades, IBM became a dominant driving force in
digitalization by continuously introducing innovations and establishing
standards and having a strong position and influence on digitalization as
a whole. Indeed, they can be compared with current digital and bigger
companies such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon—for better or worse
(Lindvall and Osowski, 2018).

Desktop Wave
Close to the end of the DP, people began to understand that greater
computer capacity could be achieved by connecting several comput-
ers, and this marks the transition into the Desktop wave. This period
started about 1980 and lasted until 1994 (Nolan, 2000; Nolan and Cro-
son, 1995). In this wave, the technical infrastructure was characterized
by centralized mainframe computers (for formal use) and decentralized
microcomputers (for informal use). This situation emerged by the intro-
duction of Apple’s microcomputer in the late 1970s and with IBM’s
Personal Computer (PC) in the early 1980s (with a Microsoft operating
system and parts of the hardware from Intel).
Over time PC became the most dominant technology that enabled,
e.g., word processing for secretaries and administrative personal, graphi-
cal systems for desktop publishing and arts departments, and spread-
sheets for finance and accounting employees. The microcomputers were
not only more user friendly because of their graphical interface (com-
pared to the DP computers), but they were also relatively cheap. Another
significant driver for change was that PC vendors sold directly to single
departments or end-users, often without any direct approval from the DP
managers.
Organizational learning increased when the PC was formally accepted.
People began to experiment with, e.g., connecting and integrating com-
puters and different ways to analyze and present the information that
the computers produced. There were also some demands for a flatter
organization structure compared to the multidivisional and functional
hierarchical structure of the DP wave. An organizational structure that
embraced risk-taking, teamwork, networking, analytical work, and flex-
ibility, and less of a command-and-control approach. However, such
demands would not translate into any larger organizational changes until
the next wave. Overall, and on a more aggregated level, the IT industry
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Northern Syria, and was in close touch with Phrygia and many of the
communities of the shore-line of Asia Minor; and which at the period
of the Tel-el-Amarna correspondence was in diplomatic relations and
on terms of equality with the Assyrian and Egyptian powers. And the
tendency of modern students, such as Messerschmidt in his Die
Hettiter, is to extend this ethnic name so as to include practically all
the Anatolian peoples who were other than the Aryan and Semitic
stocks. As far as I can discern, at the present stage of our
knowledge this is unscientific; and it is at present safer to regard the
pre-Aryan inhabitants of the Troad, Phrygia, Lycia, Caria, and Lydia,
possibly Cilicia, as varieties of an ancient Mediterranean stock to
which the people of the Minoan-Aegean culture themselves
belonged. At any rate, for the purposes of our religious comparison,
they are to be counted as a third stratum, through which as through
the Hittite the stream of influence from Mesopotamia would be
obliged to percolate before it could discharge itself upon the Hellenic
world. And these interjacent peoples are races of great mental gifts
and force; they were not likely to transmit the Mesopotamian
influence pure and unmingled with currents of their own religious life.
Therefore this great problem of old-world religion is no light one;
and fallacies here can only be avoided by the most critical
intelligence trained on the best method of comparative religious
study. We must endeavour to seize and comprehend the most
essential and characteristic features of the Babylonian-Assyrian cults
and theology; we must discover all that is at present possible, and
trust to the future for discovering more, concerning the Hittite
religion; and then we must glean all we can of the earliest forms of
cult in vogue among the other peoples of the Asia-Minor coast, and
in the early world of the Minoan-Mycenaean culture.
And if the phenomena of this area present us with certain general
resemblances to the Hellenic, we must not too hastily assume that
the West has borrowed from the East. For often in comparing the
most remote regions of the world we are struck with strange
similarities of myth and cult; and, where the possibility of borrowing
is ruled out, we must have recourse to the theory of spontaneous
generation working in obedience to similar psychical forces. The
hypothesis of borrowing, which is always legitimate where the
peoples with whom we are concerned are adjacent, is only raised to
proof either when the linguistic evidence is clear, for instance when
the divine names or the names of cult-objects are the same in the
various districts, or when the points of resemblance in ritual or
religious concept are numerous, striking, and fundamental, or
peculiar to the communities of a certain area. This is all the more
necessary to insist on, because many superficial points of
resemblance will be found in all religions that are at the same stage
of development.
Now, in beginning this wide comparative survey, one’s first
difficulty is to arrange the material in such a way as to enable one to
present a comparison that shall be definite and crucial. It would be
useless to attempt a mere synoptical outline of the Babylonian-
Sumerian religion; those whom that might content will find one in Dr.
Pinches’ handbook, The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, or Mr.
King’s Babylonian Religion, while those who desire a more thorough
and detailed presentation of it will doubtless turn to the laborious and
critical volumes of Prof. Jastrow, Die Religion Babyloniens u.
Assyriens. But for me to try to present this complex polytheism en
bloc would be useless in view of my present object; for two elaborate
religious systems cannot effectively be compared en bloc. A more
hopeful method for those who have to pass cursorily over a great
area, is to select certain salient and essential features separately,
and to see how, in regard to each one, the adjacent religious
systems agree or differ. And the method I propose to pursue
throughout this course is as follows: Ignoring the embryology of the
subject, that is to say, all discussions about the genesis of religious
forms and ideas that would contribute nothing to our purpose, I will
try to define the morphology of the Mesopotamian and Anatolian
religions; and will first compare them with the Hellenic in respect of
the element of personality in the divine perception, the tendency to,
or away from, anthropomorphism, the relation of the deities to the
natural world, to the State, and to morality, and I will consider what
we can deduce from the study of the famous law-code of
Hammurabi. A special question will arise concerning the supremacy
of the goddess, a phenomenon which may be of some importance
as a clue in our whole inquiry. The comparison will then be applied to
the religious psychology of the different peoples; and here it will be
useful to analyse and define that element of the religious temper
which we call fanaticism, and which sometimes affords one of the
crucial distinctions between one religion and another.
We may also obtain evidence from a comparison of the
cosmogonic ideas prevalent over this area, so far as the records
reveal any, as well as of the eschatological beliefs concerning man’s
future destiny and his posthumous existence. Finally, we must
compare the various cult-objects and forms of ritual, the significance
of the sacrifice; the position and organisation of the priesthood; and
here it will be convenient to consider the ritual of magic as well as of
the higher service and the part played by magic within the limits of
the higher religion. If under each of these heads we have been able
to discover certain salient points of divergence or resemblance
between the Hellene and the Mesopotamian, we may be able to
draw a general deduction of some probability concerning the whole
question. In any case we may be encouraged by the assurance that
the comparison of two complex and highly developed religions is
fruitful and interesting in itself, whether it yields us definite historical
conclusions or not.
 CHAPTER III.
The Morphology of the Compared Religions.

As I said in a previous lecture,40.1 “we must regard the religious

structure to which the cults of Anatolia and Mesopotamia belonged
as morphologically the same as the Hellenic.” The grounds of this
judgment may be now briefly shown. In his Histoire des anciennes
Religions, Tiele classifies most of these together under the category
of Nature-Religions, which he distinguishes from the ethical: he is
thinking of the distinction between that religious view in which the
divinity is closely associated, or even identified, with some natural
object, and that in which the divinity is a moral being merely, stript of
all attributes that are derived from the world of nature. Serious
objection may be taken to the terms in which this classification of
religions is expressed. The only religions which would fall under the
ethical class would be the Judaic, the Moslem, and the Christian:
and yet the Hebrews in the most exalted period of their religion
prayed to their god for rain and crops, and the Christian Churches do
the same to this day. A deity whose interest is purely ethical has only
existed in certain philosophic systems: he has never had an
established cult. On the other hand, a nature-religion, at the stage
when personal deities have been somewhat developed, which is not
also moral, has yet to be discovered. Religion, in its origin possibly
non-moral, must, as society advances, acquire the closest relations
with the social moral code. A Sun-god or Thunder-god—Shamash,
for instance, of Babylon, Mithras of Persia, Sol Invictus of the later
Roman Empire—may become a great divinity of an ethical cult and
yet retain his association with the element. And it is fruitless to
classify higher religions at least on such a basis of distinction as
“moral” and “non-moral.”41.1
It is more to the purpose of our present comparison to employ as
one of our test-standards the degree of personality in the cult-objects
of the different races. Is the popular imagination still on the level of
animism which engenders mere vaguely conceived daimones,
shadowy agents, working perhaps in amorphous groups, without
fixed names or local habitations or special individuality? Or has it
reached that stage of religious perception at which personal deities
emerge, concrete individualities clothed with special attributes,
physical, moral, spiritual? The most superficial study of the
cuneiform texts and the religious monuments of the Sumerian-
Babylonian society does not leave us in doubt how we should
answer these questions in behalf of the peoples in the
Mesopotamian valley. When the Semitic tribes first pushed their way
into these regions, swarming probably, as usual, from Arabia, at
some remotely early date, they found there the non-Semitic
Sumerian people possessed of a highly complex religious pantheon.
Bringing with them their own Shamash the sun-god, Adad the storm-
god, and the great goddess Ishtar, and perhaps other divinities, they
nevertheless took over the whole Sumerian pantheon, with its
elaborate liturgy of hymns and incantations; and for the record of this
great and fascinating hieratic literature the Sumerian language—with
interlinear Babylonian-Assyrian paraphrase—was preserved down to
the beginning of our era. This religious system of dateless antiquity
suffered little change “from the drums and tramplings” of all the
conquerors from the time of Sargon 1st and the kings before
Hammurabi to the day of the Macedonian Seleukos. And in a sketch
of this system as it prevailed in the second millennium B.C. it is quite
useless for our purpose to try to distinguish between Sumerian and
Semitic elements. It is more valuable to formulate this obvious fact,
that a widespread belief in personal concrete divinities, upon which
an advanced polytheism was based, was an immemorial
phenomenon in this region. Tiele’s hypothesis42.1 that the earliest
Sumerian system was not so much a polytheism as a
polydaimonism, out of which certain definite gods gradually emerged
some time before the Semitic period, is merely a priori theorising.
The earliest texts and monuments reveal as vigorous a faith in real
divine personalities as the latest: witness42.2 that interesting relief
recently found on a slab in the caravan route near Zohab, on which
the goddess In-Hinni is bringing captives to the King Annubanini: the
evidence of the text accompanying it points to a period earlier than
that of King Hammurabi. We may compare with this the impressive
relief which shows us the stately form of Hammurabi receiving his
code of laws from the sun-god Shamash seated on his throne43.1;
and of a later date, the alabaster relief from Khorsabad showing a
sacrifice to Marduk, a speaking witness to the stern solemnity of the
Babylonian worship and to the strength of the faith in personal
divinity.43.2 That this faith was as real in the polytheistic Babylonian
as in the monotheistic Israelite is evinced not merely by the
monuments, but still more clearly and impressively by the Sumerian
hymns and liturgies.
Nevertheless the phenomena of animism coexist in all this region
with those of developed theism. By the side of these high personal
deities we find vague companies of divine powers such as the Igigi
and the Anunnaki, who are conceived more or less as personal but
without clearly imagined individuality, the former being perhaps
definable as the daimones of heaven, the latter as the daimones of
earth. Similarly, in the Hellenic system we note such nameless
companies of divine agencies as the Ἐρινύες and Πραξιδίκαι,
conceived independently of the concrete figures of the polytheism.
But, further, in the Mesopotamian religion we must reckon seriously
with lower products of polydaemonism than these, the demons of
evil and disease who so dominated the imagination and much of the
religious life of the private person that the chief object of the
elaborate ritual was, as we shall see, to combat these. Only, as the
curtain gradually rolls away from the remote past of this earliest
home of human culture, it is not given us to see the gradual
emergence of the divine personalities, or trace—as perhaps we may
elsewhere—the process from polydaimonism to theism. The gods,
as far as we can discern, were always there, and at least it is not in
the second millennium B.C. that me may hope to find the origins of
theistic religion.
As regards the other Semitic stocks, the cumulative evidence of
early inscriptions, literary records, and legends is sufficient proof that
the belief in high personal divinities was predominant in this
millennium. It is not necessary to labour here at the details of the
proof; the other lines of inquiry that I am soon going to follow will give
sufficient illustration of this; and it is enough to allude to the wide
prevalence of the designation of the high god as Baal or Bel, which
can be traced from Assyria through Syria, in the Aramaean
communities, in Canaan and Phoenicia, and in the Phoenician
colonies: the Moabite Stone tells us of Chemosh; the earliest
Carthaginian inscriptions of Baal-Hammon and Tanit; from our
earliest witness for Arabian religion, Herodotus,44.1 we learn that the
Arabs named their two chief divinities, Orotal and Alilat, a god and a
goddess, whom he identifies with Dionysos and Aphrodite Ourania.
It is still more important for us to know the stage reached by the
Hittite religion in this early period; for in the latter half of the second
millennium the influence of the Hittite culture had more chance of
touching the earliest Greek societies than had that of the remote
Mesopotamia or of the inaccessible Canaanites. In the last thirty
years the explorers of Asia Minor, notably Sir William Ramsay and
Dr. Hogarth, have done inestimable service to the comparative study
of the Mediterranean area by the discovery and interpretation of the
monuments of Hittite art: and the greatest of them all, the rock-cut
reliefs of Boghaz-Keui in Cappadocia, has given material to Dr.
Frazer for constructing an elaborate theory of Hittite sacrifice in his
‘Attis, Adonis, Osiris.’ But, before dealing with the Hittite monuments,
the student should note the literary evidence which is offered by the
treaty inscribed on a silver tablet (circ. 1290 B.C.) found in Egypt,
which was ratified between Ramses II. and the Hittite King
Chattusar;45.1 the witnesses to the treaty are the thousand gods and
goddesses of the Hittite land and the thousand gods and goddesses
of Egypt. We are certainly here not dealing with mere vague
pluralities of spirits, such as may be found in an animistic system of
Shamanism; the thousand is only a vague numeral for the plurality of
divinities in the Hittite and Egyptian polytheism; the difference of sex
would alone suffice to prove that the Hittite had developed the cult of
personal deities, and the document expressly quotes the great
heaven-god of the Hittites, called by the Egyptian name Sutekh, and
regarded as compeer of the Egyptian Ra. Other personal Hittite
deities are alluded to in the document, and among them appears to
be mentioned a certain “Antheret of the land of Kheta.”45.2 Possibly a
witness of still earlier date speaks in the Tel-Amarna letters, the
earliest diplomatic correspondence in the world; one of these, written
in cuneiform to Amenhotep III., in the fifteenth century B.C., is from
Tushratta, the King of the Mitani people.45.3 Tushratta sends his
daughter in marriage to Pharaoh, and prays that “Shamash and
Ishtar may go before her,” and that Amon may “make her correspond
to my brother’s wish.” He even dispatches a statue of Ishtar of
Nineveh, that “she may exercise her beneficent power in the land of
Egypt”; for she had revealed her desire by an oracle—“to Egypt to
the land that I love will I go.”
The Mitani chieftains bear names that show a convincingly Aryan
formation, and we know from the momentous inscriptions found in
1907 at Boghaz-Keui recording treaties between the king of the
Hittites and the king of the Mitani (B.C. 1400), that the dynasts of the
latter people had Aryan gods in their pantheon.46.1 But the Mitani
themselves were not Aryans, and are assumed by Winckler and
Messerschmidt to be Hittites.46.2 If this were proved, the theory
which it is the general aim of these lectures to consider, that the
Babylonian religious system may have reached the Mediterranean in
the second millennium, would receive a certain vraisemblance from
the fact revealed by the letter of King Tushratta, namely, that the
Mitani of this period had adopted some of the Mesopotamian
personal divinities, and might therefore have transmitted them to the
coast of Asia Minor. Yet the Hittites had their own local divine names;
from the cuneiform inscriptions written in the Hittite language found
at Van in Armenia, we gather the names of various Hittite gods,
Teshup, for instance, who appears on a column found at Babylon
holding the lightning, and in his right hand a hammer, which, from the
analogy of other religions, we may interpret as the fetich-emblem of
the thunder.46.3
In fact, apart from the literary evidence, the Hittite monuments
would be proof sufficient of the high development of personal religion
in these regions. A relief with Hittite inscriptions, found near Ibriz, the
old Kybistra, near the Cilician gates north of Tauros, shows us a
deity with corn and grapes, and a priest adoring;47.1 he is evidently
conceived, like Baal by the Semites of Canaan, as a local god of the
earth and of vegetation. But the most striking of all the Hittite
monuments, and one that is all-sufficient in itself for our present
purpose, is the great series of reliefs on the rock at Boghaz-Keui in
Cappadocia, not far from the site of the ancient Pteria.47.2 Here is
revealed a great and probably mystic pageant of an advanced
polytheism with an elaborate ritual and a clear faith in high gods and
goddesses: the whole procession seems to be passing along the
narrowing gorge towards a Holy of Holies, the inner cave-shrine of
the Mystery.
As we draw nearer to the Mediterranean, the facts are too well
known to need reiteration here. Everywhere we find proofs of a
personal theism reaching far back into prehistoric times: whether it
be the cult of a high god such as the Cilician divinity, called Zeus or
Herakles by the later Greeks, or the Lycian “Apollo,” or a great
goddess such as Ma of Comana, Cybele of Phrygia and Lydia. And
now to all this testimony we can add the recently discovered
monuments of a developed Minoan-Mycenaean religion with the
elaborate ritual and worship of personal divinities,
anthropomorphically imagined on the whole.
Such was the religious world lying before the feet of the Aryan
Hellenes descending from the north; and when their expansion
across the islands to the Asiatic shores began, they would find
everywhere a religion more or less on the same plane of
development. Therefore if, as some students appear to imagine, the
aboriginal Hellene had not developed personal gods before he
arrived,48.1 it would be irrational to conclude that Babylon had taught
him to worship such beings in place of the vague and flitting daimon.
His immediate teachers would be the Minoan-Mycenaean peoples;
and that their theistic system was derived from Babylon is a theory
lacking both positive evidence and a priori probability, as I may
afterwards indicate. But that the proto-Hellenic peoples were in that
backward condition of religious thought, is in the highest degree
improbable. We must suppose that early in the second millennium
they were slowly pushing their way down through the Balkans and
through the country that is afterwards Thrace. So far as the earliest
myths and records of this region throw some light on its prehistoric
darkness, it appears to have been dominated by a great god. When
the Thraco-Phrygian race, and possibly their kinsmen the Bithynoi,
penetrated into the same region, they brought with them a father-
god, who accompanied members of these stocks into Asia Minor,
and settled in Phrygia, Pontus, and Bithynia by the side of an earlier
goddess. Their cousins of the Indo-Iranian stock had certainly
reached the stage of personal polytheism before 1400 B.C., as the
epoch-making discovery of the Hittite-Mitani inscriptions at Boghaz-
Keui, referred to above, sufficiently indicates.48.2 We cannot believe
that the Hellenes of the earliest migration were inferior in culture to
those Thracians, Bithynians, or even Indo-Iranians; for various
reasons we must believe the reverse. And we now know from
modern anthropology that peoples at a very low grade of culture, far
lower than that which the Aryan stocks had reached at the time of
the great migrations, have yet attained to the idea of personal and
relatively high gods. In fact, that scepticism of certain philological
theorists who, a few years ago, were maintaining that the Aryans
before their separation may have had no real gods at all, is
beginning to appear audacious and uncritical. At any rate, in regard
to the Hellenes, the trend of the evidence is to my mind weighty and
clear, making for the conviction that the different stocks not only
possessed the cult of personal gods, but had already the common
worship of certain deities when first they entered Greece. Otherwise,
when we consider the mutual hostility of the various tribes and the
geographical difficulties in the way of intercourse in early Greece, it
would be difficult to explain the religious facts of the Homeric poems.
We might, indeed, if Homer was our only witness, suspect him of
representing what was merely local Achaean religion as common to
all Greece. But we can check him by many other witnesses, by
ancient myths and cults of diverse localities. Zeus was worshipped
by some, at least, of the main tribes, when they were in the
neighbourhood of Olympus: he is no more Thessalian than he is
Dryopian. One of the earliest Hellenic immigrants were perhaps the
Minyai, and their aboriginal god was Poseidon. The ritual of Apollo
preserves the clearest reminiscence of his entry from the north, and
he is the high god of one of the oldest Hellenic tribes, the Dryopes,
and the wide diffusion of his cult suggests that aboriginally it was a
common inheritance of several stocks. The force of the evidence that
may be urged for this view is ignored by Wilamowitz in his brilliant
but fallacious theory of the Lycian origin of the god. We must reject
the hypothesis of a proto-Hellenic godless period; but, on the other
hand, the mere fact that the early Greek religion appears on the
same plane as the Mesopotamian, in respect of the worship of
personal beings, gives no support at all to the theory of Oriental
influence. If it is to be accepted, it must be sustained by more special
evidence.
 CHAPTER IV.
Anthropomorphism and Theriomorphism in Asia
Minor and the Mediterranean.

A comparison made according to the test we have just applied is

not so important as that which arises in the second stage of the
inquiry. Assuming that the peoples on the east and west of the
Aegean were already on the same religious plane when the first
glimmer of what may be called history begins, can we discern certain
striking resemblances or differences in their conception and
imagination of divinity, sufficient to prove or disprove the theory of
borrowing or of a movement across large areas of certain waves of
religious influence emanating from a fixed centre?
The comparison now becomes more complex, and can only be
summarily attempted. The first leading question concerns the way in
which the personal divine being is imagined. In Mesopotamia was
the religious perception dominatingly anthropomorphic, not merely in
the sense that the higher divine attributes were suggested by the
higher moral and spiritual life of humanity, but in the more material
sense that the deity was imagined and represented habitually in
human form? This question has been summarily treated in the first
chapter. The Mesopotamian cults are mainly anthropomorphic; in the
earliest hymns and liturgies, as well as in the art-monuments, the
divinities appear to have been imagined as glorified human forms.
The figure of Shamash on the relief, where he sits enthroned
inspiring Hammurabi,52.1 the form of Ninni bringing the captives to
Annabanini,52.2 prove a very early dominance of anthropomorphic art
in Mesopotamia. And the rule holds true on the whole of nearly all
the great divinities of the Pantheon; the statue of Nebo the scribe-
god in the British Museum,52.3 and the representation of him on the
cylinders, are wholly anthropomorphic. The seven planetary deities
on the relief from Maltaija are human-shaped entirely;52.4 we may
say the same of the procession of deities on the relief from a palace
of Nineveh published by Layard,52.5 except that Marduk has horns
branching from the top of his head; just as on the alabaster relief
containing the scene of worship noted above,52.6 and on the wall-
relief in the British Museum he is represented with wings; but even
the rigorous anthropomorphism of Greece tolerated both these
adjuncts to the pure human type. The types of Ramman the weather-
god,52.7 and the representations of a Babylonian goddess, who is
occasionally found with a child on her knee, and whom sometimes
we may recognise as Ishtar, show nothing that is theriomorphic. On
the other hand, we must note exceptions to this general rule. In one
of the cuneiform inscriptions that describe certain types of deities, we
read the following: “Horn of a bull, clusters of hair falling on his back;
human countenance, and strength of a…; wings… and lion’s body.”
And this description agrees exactly, as Jeremias has pointed out,
with the winged colossal figures, half-lion, half-man, that guarded the
gate of the palace of Nineveh. And we must therefore interpret them
as gods, not as mere genii; and he gives some reason for regarding
them as a type of Nergal, the god of the underworld.53.1
Further, we find in an inscription of Asarhaddon the following
prayer: “May the gracious bull-god and lion-god ever dwell in that
palace, protecting the path of my royalty.”53.2
There is some doubt in regard to the winged figures with eagles’
heads on the reliefs from Khorsabad, in the British Museum (pl. 38-
40): they are represented holding pine-cones and a “cista mystica”
on each side of the sacred tree, and might be genii engaged in
worship; but on one of the reliefs Assur-nasir-Pal is standing before
one of them in attitude of adoration.
But the most clear and definite evidence on this point is afforded
by the legend and monuments of the god whom Berosos calls
Oannes,53.3 but whom modern Assyriology interprets as the ocean-
born god Ea or Ae of Eridu, the god of all wisdom and science.
According to Berosos, he had entirely a fish body, but a human head
had grown under the head of the fish, human feet out of the fish’s
tail, and he spoke with human voice: a statue of this type was still
existing at Babylon according to this writer in the time of Alexander.
Now the exact type is presented in the form that appears on various
Babylonian cylinders; there is one that presents the fish-man-god
standing before the tree of Life—receiving a ray perhaps from the
sun above:53.4 and half his form from the girdle downwards is
preserved on a bas-relief published by Layard,54.1 showing him
holding the bread of life in one hand and in the other a vase
containing the water of life. Here, then, is theriomorphism struggling
with anthropomorphism as we see it strikingly in the religious
monuments of Egypt.
But we have no need of the theory, dear to some anthropologists
—that the earliest period of Mesopotamian religion was purely
theriomorphic, when the deities were imagined and represented
merely as animals, and that the human-shaped deities whom we find
standing on lions in the Babylonian art had once been divine lions
and nothing more, and had at a later period emerged from the
animal into divine manhood. Theriomorphism and anthropomorphism
can and generally do confusedly co-exist: neither in the lowest
savagery or at the highest culture is there found a purely
theriomorphic art or theriomorphic religion; on the other hand, severe
anthropomorphism among the ancient religions is to be found only in
the Hellenic, and we may add in the Judaic, though here with a quite
different mode of expression and far more sternly controlled. In
Mesopotamia we have nothing that points to a direct worship of
animals,54.2 but we discern that the anthropomorphism is unstable;
the religious artist mainly clung to it, except when he was embodying
forms of terror, the destructive demons, and especially the powers of
the lower world: for this purpose he selected the most portentous
types of bestiality, such as we find on that bronze tablet, which used
to be regarded as revealing an interesting glimpse into Babylonian
eschatology: at least we may be sure that the lion-headed female
above the horse in the canoe, at whose breasts two small lions are
sucking, is the goddess of Hell.55.1 It was probably through his
association with the world of death that Nergal acquired something
of the lion’s nature, and even the very human goddess Ishtar might
assume a lion’s head when she was unusually wroth, though this
rests on a doubtful text. We may say, then, with fair degree of
accuracy, that the theriomorphic forms of Babylonian religious art
belong to demonology; and in this domain the Babylonian artist has
shown the same powerful imagination as the Mycenaean: it is the
former to whom we are indebted for the attractively alarming type of
the scorpion-man.
The phrase “unstable anthropomorphism” applies also to the
religious literature, to the Sumerian-Babylonian hymns. The
imagination of the poets in their highest exaltation was certainly
anthropomorphic on the whole; the high divinities are conceived and
presented with the corporeal, moral, and spiritual traits of glorified
humanity. But often in the ecstasy of invocation the religious poets
felt the human image too narrow and straightened for their struggling
sense of the Infinite. Then the expression becomes mystic, and by
virtue of a curious law that I indicated above, it avails itself of
theriomorphic imagery.55.2 I quoted the hymn to the warrior Marduk
that invokes him as “Black Bull of the deep, Lion of the Dark House.”
Of still more interest is the invocation of Enlil, the earth-god of
Sumer: “Overpowering ox, exalted overpowering ox, at thy word
which created the world, O lord of lands, lord of the word of life, O
Enlil, Father of Sumer, shepherd of the dark-haired people, thou who
hast vision of thyself.”56.1 Seven times the words “overpowering ox”
are added in this mystic incantation. In another hymn Enlil is “the Bull
that overwhelms”; Ea, “the Ram of Eridu.”
But this is mystic symbolism, rather than a clear perception of
divine personality; and we may say the same of such vaguely
picturesque phrases as “Bel, the great mountain,” “Asur, the great
rock,” an expression parallel to our “Rock of Ages.”56.2
It naturally happens in a religion of unstable anthropomorphism
that the different personalities are unfixed and may melt away one
into the other, or may become conceived as metaphysical
emanations, thus losing concrete individuality. As Dr. Langdon
remarks of Babylonian religious phraseology, “the god himself
becomes mystified, he retires into the hazy conception of an all-
pervading spirit, and his word becomes the active agent.”56.3 Thus
even the strongly personal goddess “Nana” is identified with the
word of Enlil; she herself exclaims, “Of the Lord his word am I.” His
statement accords with the general impression that the liturgies and
monuments of this vast and complex religion make upon the student.
One discerns that the religious art, and to some extent the religious
poetry, developed and strengthened the anthropomorphic faith and
perception of the people, but not so powerfully as to preclude a
mysticising tendency towards metaphysical speculation that
transcended the limits of a polytheism of concrete personalities.
Even Allatu, the goddess of Hell, she who was presented with the
dog’s head and the lions at the breast, was half spiritualised by the
epithet which is rendered “spirit-wind of the consecrate.”57.1
In the other ancient Semitic communities we find the same
phenomenon, a prevailing anthropomorphism with some slight
admixture of theriomorphic idea. At Bambyke, the later Hierapolis,
we have the record and tradition of Atargatis-Derketo, of human and
fish-form combined. In the cult of Esmun in Phoenicia, Baudissin57.2
suspects the incarnation of the god in a snake, which brought about
his later identification with Asklepios, and he suggests that the
bronze serpent that healed the Israelites in the desert was borrowed
from a Canaanite idol of a healing snake. The Astarte-images found
in prehistoric Palestine are mainly of human type, but one gives her
the curving horns of a ram, and a rude bronze was found at Tel
Zakariya of an amphibious goddess with human head and the tail of
a fish.57.3 Something real underlies the statement of Sanchuniathon,
quoted by Eusebios, that Astarte placed on her own head the head
of a bull.58.1
But these are exceptional phenomena; and as the Hellenes in the
later period were usually able to identify the leading Semitic deities
with their own, we may see in this another proof that the Western
and Eastern religions were nearly on the same plane as regards
their perception of divine personality.
Only, we discern signs in Canaan as in Mesopotamia, that the
anthropomorphism is, as I have called it, unstable; for not only can
the divinity be imagined as embodied in other forms than the human,
but the demarcations of individuality tend at certain points to fall
away: the most curious instance of this is that the female divinity
seems at times to have been almost absorbed in the god. We must,
however, distinguish here between what is real belief and what is
mere theologic phrasing. In a hymn of praise to Ishtar, composed for
the King Ashurbanapal, the equality of the goddess with the great
Assyrian god Asshur is quaintly expressed by the phrase, “like
Ashur, she wears a beard”; but Jastrow58.2 protests against the
inference that the goddess was therefore really regarded as male in
the Mesopotamian religion. And indeed this is probably only a
fantastic expression of the idea that Ishtar is the compeer in power of
the god, and has much of the masculine temperament. Even in the
full vogue of an anthropomorphic religion which insists on the
distinctions of sex, a mystical religious thinker could rise to the idea
that the divinity might assume the powers of both natures, an idea of
which we find a glimpse in the later Greek and Greek-Egyptian
theosophy. Thus a Sumerian hymn to Enlil characterises him as
“Lord of winds, father and mother who creates himself”;59.1 and a
well-known hymn to Sin speaks of him as “Maternal Body that brings
everything to birth,” and in the next line as “Compassionate, gracious
father.”59.2
The close approximation of the goddess to the god is more clearly
discernible in the Canaanite religion. On the Moabite Mesha stone,
Ashtar-Chemosh appears as a double divinity; and one of the earlier
Carthaginian inscriptions refers to a temple of Moloch-Astarte.59.3
Again Astarte, in the inscription on the sarcophagus of Eshmounazar
of Sidon, is called Astart-Shem-Baal, which signifies Astarte the
Face of Baal; and in the Carthaginian inscriptions the same
designation occurs for Tanit. Renan has interpreted the phrase as
expressing the dogma that the goddess is an emanation of the god,
but Dr. Langdon would explain it as arising from the close opposition
of the two statues face to face, Astart-Shem-Baal merely meaning,
then, “She who fronts Baal.” Whichever interpretation be correct,
such close assimilation of the pair might evolve here and there the
concept of a bisexual divinity. Unless the evidence of the classical
writers is false, it did so at a later period under Phoenician influences
in Cyprus. Macrobius tells us that there was in that island a statue of
a bearded deity in female dress, regarded as bisexual, and he
quotes Philochoros as witness to the fact, and to the curious
phenomenon in the ritual in which the men wore female dress and
the women male. This explains Catullus’ phrase “duplex Amathusia”
of the bisexual goddess. Servius and the Christian fathers repeat the
statement, and Joannes Lydus asserts that the Pamphylians at one
time worshipped a bearded Aphrodite;60.1 if we trust his authority, we
might explain the fact as due to late Semitic influence, which is
somewhat attested by inscriptions on the coinage of Pamphylia
under the Persian domination.60.2 But, at the most, we can only
regard this cult as a late phenomenon, a local eccentricity, and a
morbid development of a certain vague idea that was working
sporadically in the old Semitic religion. We have no right to assert, as
some have occasionally ventured, that the Semitic peoples generally
accepted the dogma of a bisexual divinity.
Turning now to the other great area of culture that lay between
Mesopotamia and the coast, that of the Hittite kingdoms, we find that
the Hittite deity is usually presented in human form. On the great
relief of Boghaz-Keui, the distinctions of the human family appear in
the divine forms, in whom we may recognise the father god, the
mother goddess with her young son, or it may be, as Dr. Frazer
suggests, with her young lover. And the other Hittite representations
of divinity to which I have referred above are of purely human form,
and so also are the small Hittite bronze idols in the Ashmolean
Museum. Nevertheless here, as in Mesopotamia, the theriomorphic
fancy was active at the same time. On the relief at Boghaz-Keui,
nearest to the innermost shrine, the Holy of Holies, is an idol of
human visage with a body composed of a bizarre arrangement of
lion-forms; and in the procession near to the main deities we note a
strange representation of two bulls in mitred caps of Hittite fashion,
and to these mystic beasts we may apply the name theanthropic,
which Robertson Smith suggested for the sacrificial animal that was
half-divine, half-human. And clearer evidence still is afforded by
another relief found not far from this site at the palace of Euiuk,
where a bull is represented on a pedestal with worshippers
approaching.61.1 He is not here the sacrificial animal, for he and the
altar before him are on a higher plane, while the priest and priestess
below are raising their hands to him as if in adoration, and are
leading rams evidently as victims to the bull-god. We may be sure,
then, that there was some close association of the Hittite divinity with
the bull, as there was with the lions upon which both god and
goddess are standing; and this is further illustrated by the horns that
adorn the conical cap of the god at Ibriz,61.2 to whom the grapes and
corn were consecrated.
Again, the relief on the gate at Sinjerli61.3 affords us another clear
example of a divinity only partly anthropomorphic: a god with the
body of a man and the head of a lion; as he bears a hunting weapon
in one hand and a hare in the other, and on each shoulder a bird is
sitting, we may regard him as a deity of the chase. Finally, from
certain cuneiform texts found at Boghaz-Keui, and recently published
and interpreted by Professor Sayce,61.4 we gather that the eagle,
probably the double-headed eagle which appears as an ensign on
Hittite monuments, was deified; for we appear to have a reference to
“the house” or temple “of the eagle” (Bit Id Khu), and this fact may
help to explain the figure of a man’s body with a bird’s head on a
relief of Sinjerli.62.1
As regards the test, then, that we are at present applying, it seems
that the Hittite and the Mesopotamian religions were more or less on
the same plane, though we may suspect that theriolatry was stronger
in the former. It is also important for our purpose to register in
passing the clear proof of certain religious approximations, probably
in the second millennium B.C., between the Hittites and the
Assyrian-Babylonian kingdom. The Hittite god Teshup, with the
double-headed hammer or axe and the forked lightning in his hand,
is of close kin and similar in type to the Canaanite, Syrian, and
Babylonian Ramman-Adad, the god of storms.62.2 But the evidence
does not yet seem to me to make it clear which people or group of
peoples was in this case the borrower, which the lender. And the
same doubt arises in respect of the striking art-type of the divinity
standing on the lion; we find it in the early Hittite monuments, such
as the Boghaz-Keui sculptured slabs; and again on the relief of
Gargamich, on which is a winged male deity standing on a lion and a
priest behind him, also on a lion;62.3 and later among the Tarsos
representations of the Hittite Sandon: it was in vogue at the Syrian
Bambyke and at Babylon. The assumption of Perrot62.4 is that it was
of Babylonian origin, but the art-chronology does not seem to speak
decisively in this matter. It is not necessary here to prejudge this
difficult problem: it does not directly affect our present question, as
the type of the goddess with lions comes into Hellas only at a later
period. As regards the other Anatolian peoples who came into close
contact with the Hellenes, we may find abiding influences of certain
Hittite religious ideas and motives of religious art. We may admit that
the lion-borne goddess of Boghaz-Keui is the prototype of Kybele,
even the crenelated headdress that she wears suggesting the
turreted diadem of the later goddess: it is likely that the ancient type
of Teshup, the weather-god with hammer or axe and the lightning,
survived in Commagene in the cult-figure that was afterwards
interpreted as Jupiter Dolichenus: and it may have influenced the
ideas about the thunder-god in Pontus, as a primitive relief of a god
brandishing a thunderbolt and holding a shield has been found near
Amasia.63.1 Speaking generally, we must pronounce the native pre-
Hellenic religious art of the Asia Minor littoral, of Phrygia, Lydia,
Caria, anthropomorphic, so far as it tried at all to embody the
imagined form of the divinity. The record is generally blurred by the
later Hellenic influences. But we have at least in Phrygia rude
images of the pre-Hellenic Cybele; the intention of these is
anthropomorphic, and in the rough outline of the goddess’s form as
hewn out of the rock of Sipylos above Smyrna, the Hellenes could
discern their sorrowing Niobe. Where the anthropomorphism fails, as
in the Phrygian monument, which shows Cybele seated with a phiale
and human-shaped in other respects, but with a head fashioned like
“the round capital of a pillar,”64.1 the influence of the aniconic fetich
may be the cause. At any rate, we have no clear trace of
theriomorphism either in the legend nor in the monuments of the
great mother, the Kybele of Phrygia, or the Mā of Cappadocia. The
power of the mountain-goddess was incarnate in the lions, but we
have no ground for saying that she herself was ever worshipped as a
lion.
We turn at last to the Minoan-Mycenaean and proto-Hellenic
periods; for our present purpose the two cannot well be kept apart,
as much of the evidence concerning the former is derived from
records of myths and religious customs that were in vogue in the
later period. Our first glimpse of the Minoan religion, which Sir Arthur
Evans more than any one else has revealed to us,64.2 gave us the
impression of an aniconic worship that had for its sacred “agalmata”