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Polytheism literally means many gods. According to anthropologsts, it's the religion of primative man and therefore assumed to be the first. We must remember that anthropology, and anthropologists, view themselvesabove the supersition and myths of religion, and as firmly grounded in the reason of science (that they don't view as religion). From this position, they laid out the history of man - from the primative through the first civilization to the enlightenment (western). Primative man was afraid of nature and from this fear created the gods and spirits of nature. To commune with, and deal with, a medium was needed. This was the shaman - commonly called the witch doctor.
The shaman was central to tribal life. He was said to live in two worlds - this world and the spirit world. From this point, he instructed the growth of the tribe and it's relationship with their animal spirit guides. This basic structure is common to all nomadic people. However, as people settled, the relationship with nature changed and so did the gods. This can be seen in the polynesians, they were sea nomadics, but then settled on islands in the south pacific. Here we see a new level of relationship. The king is the central focus and divinely linked, they were not isolated, but among other kingdoms - each with war gods. Archeology has shown, as settlement became more common (and eventually the standard), the more common war gods became. It was during this period, where individual cities (settlements) we kingdoms, that warrior kingdoms began to expand (desiring more land). There were three fundamental types of war, tribe to tribe, tribe to kingdom, and kingdom to kingdom. Typically, weaker tribes were absorbed into the stronger, but this changed with the conquest of a kingdom. Although when a tribe would beat a kindom, it was the tribe that was absorbed into the kindgom. This joining do to war, when applied to the kingdom to kingdom wars, produced empires.
Through these changes from tribe to kingdom to empire, polytheism remained a constant - although the specific gods changed. Spirits of nature became the gods of nature - like Egyptian god Anubis, who was the god of the dead. The primative goddes of fertility became Aphroditi the goddess of love. There were gods of the sky, who replaced the spirits of the sky. The spirits of the water were replaced with a god (like Poseidon). All this was brought to light (in the west) through two branches of science anthropogoly (that studied primative tribes)and archeology (that studied the ruins of the past). In the faces of the secular western intelectuals, who were supposed to be superior in thought and reason (not prone like the uncivilized supersitious world or religion). They even showed that as dynasties changed, so did the gods. The gods of polytheism did not live forever, but changed over a period of time. Tribal gods were specific to the tribe, and kingdom (and empire) gods were specific to the king (or dynasty). Archaeology has shown that as tribe grew into kingdoms the number of gods grew and the religions were many. This apparently, continued into the empires,which were societies of many religions.
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