Neith

Definition

Neith (Egyptian Njt) is one of the oldest Egyptian deities, a creator-goddess, warrior, and weaver worshipped from before the First Dynasty to the end of pharaonic times. Her chief cult city is Sais in the northern Delta. In the late cosmology recorded at the temple of Esna she is the androgynous creator — "the father of the fathers, the mother of the mothers" — a single god acting as both, who brings forth the sun-god Re from the primeval waters and is said to give birth to all the stars.

In Tradition

Egyptologists describe Neith as a many-sided deity: a warrior whose earliest emblems are crossed arrows and a bow, a mother-goddess, a funerary protector of the dead, and a creator identified with the waters of Nun, the dark boundless ocean that precedes creation. In the Esna theology she is the self-begetting source of everything — one expression of a very ancient goddess whose prominence rose and fell with the fortunes of her home city Sais.

In Practice

Neith is in scope for Egyptian sky-work mainly through the Esna cosmogony, one of two creation traditions carved into the Greco-Roman temple of Esna (Latopolis). There she is the androgynous first being who created Re when he swam as a Nile-perch in the waters of Nun, and a text credits her with giving birth to "all of the stars (khabes), they arise and then they set" — a direct tie between this goddess and the rising-and-setting star-vault. At Esna she was worshipped alongside the ram-god Khnum, the temple's lord, whose ceiling carries the rectangular "Esna A" zodiac. Neith's pre-eminence surged again in the 26th Dynasty (the Saite period), when kings from Sais ruled Egypt and elevated their city's goddess back to first rank. For an Egyptian-tradition reading, naming Neith signals an Esna or Saite creation context, not horoscopic astrology.

Historical Origin

Neith is attested from the prehistoric and Early Dynastic periods — her name forms part of the First-Dynasty royal names Neithotep and Merneith — to the end of the pharaonic age. Her androgynous-creator role appears in the late texts of the temple of Esna (Greco-Roman period), and Herodotus described her temple and festival at Sais in the fifth century BCE. She is treated in Wilkinson, *The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt* (2003); her Esna cosmogony in Belmonte & Lull, *Astronomy of Ancient Egypt* (2018).

Further Reading

• Richard H. Wilkinson, The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt
• Juan Antonio Belmonte & José Lull, Astronomy of Ancient Egypt