What is the date/location of origin of polytheism?
Please, this is like trying to find the date and location of history’s first cooked meal! Polytheism (belief in multiple deities) was developed by many different cultures, independent of each other. And given that both came about WAY before the invention of dating systems or even writing, we sure wouldn’t have documentation for it. Even so, people didn’t come up with the concept overnight. When you trace back polytheism far enough, it gets fuzzy where the line between polytheism and animism is drawn.
Nobody knows. It is as old as recorded history and more. Sumerians, Egyptians etc all wrote of polytheism, and archaeology has found idols in the ruins of older societies than we can ever know anything about, since they left no writings. Even in neolithic times male and female idols can be found. It is, obviously then, much much older than monotheism which came about first in Egypt with Re-Harakhty and then spread throughout much of the middle east in the next centuries, including the amalgamation of Canaanite El and Edomite Yahweh into the one (but strangely many-named) god of the Bible.
