Neith

Summary

Neith is one of the oldest Egyptian goddesses, the lady of Sais in the western Delta. Her emblem, a shield with two crossed arrows, appears on stelae of the First Dynasty, and her name enters royal names of that age. She is drawn as a woman wearing the Red Crown of Lower Egypt. At first she was a goddess of hunting or war who opened the ways for the king so that he would prevail in battle; so she became a protecting goddess and entered the burial rites: she appears in the Pyramid Texts with Selkis, Isis and Nephthys, and as the goddess who invented weaving she was linked with the mummy bandages in which the dead were wrapped. Her importance faded through the Old Kingdom and rose again in the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, when Sais became Egypt's capital.

Her best-known story makes her the mother to whom the gods appeal. In the Contendings of Horus and Seth the divine council spends eighty years unable to judge between Horus and Seth over the office of Osiris, and Banebdjede, "the great living god", says: "Let us not decide in ignorance. Have a letter sent to Neith the Great, the divine mother. What she will say, we will do." Thoth writes the letter in the name of the All-Lord, and Neith answers: "Give the office of Osiris to his son Horus, and don't do those big misdeeds that are out of place. Or I shall get angry and the sky will crash to the ground! And let it be said to the All-Lord: Double Seth's possessions. Give him Anat and Astarte, your two daughters. And place Horus on the seat of his father!" The council says with one voice: "This goddess is right!" But Re grows angry and mocks Horus, the dispute drags on, Isis swears "as my mother lives, the goddess Neith", and Horus sails downstream to Sais to complain to Neith that the case has been in court for eighty years.

In the Roman-period temple of Khnum at Esna a long text, recited at the feast of the thirteenth of the month Epiphi, tells how the world began with Neith. She was "father of fathers and mother of mothers", who came into being by herself in the midst of Nun, the first water, while the earth was in darkness. She became a cow, then a fish, then made the gaze of her eyes shine, and there was light. She said: "May this place become for me a platform of earth in the midst of the waters, so that I may lean on it", and it did, and it was Esna, which is also Sais. She created thirty gods and named them one by one, and they said to her: "You separated light from darkness for us, made us a land to lean on, and divided night from day." Then she told them of a god to be born: "When he opens his eye there will be light, when he closes it, darkness; men will come from the tears of his eye and gods from the spittle of his lips; his children will rebel against him and be struck down in his name." From the moisture of her body she made an egg; when the egg broke through the water the inundation came into being, and then the egg broke and Re came out of it. When he could not see his mother he wept in the water, and men came from his tears; when he saw her he salivated, and the gods came from his spittle. What Neith had spat into the first water the primordial gods drove out, and it became a serpent a hundred and twenty cubits long named Apophis, whose heart plotted rebellion against Re with his confederates. Thoth came out of Re's heart in his sorrow, and Re sent him against the rebels. Then Neith said to her son, "Come with me to Esna, which is also Sais", became a cow, set Re between her horns, and swam with him through the water until she reached Sais.

The idea Neith's stories turn on is that she comes first: the mother who gave birth before birth existed. That is what her priest at Sais, the physician Udjahorresne, wrote on his statue in the Persian period: Sais is "the seat of Neith-the-Great, the mother who bore Re and inaugurated birth when birth had not yet been", her temple "is heaven in its every aspect", and when he told Cambyses so, Cambyses prostrated himself before her. Because she is first, her opinion is sought in judgment, the council declares her right, and she can threaten to bring the sky down on the earth. She is also the weaver, and the dead are wrapped in the linen whose weaving she invented.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Egyptian writes it Nj.t: n, then y, then a t after a dot, the dot marking the t as the feminine ending. Plato writes it Νηίθ. The project's Egyptian essay reads it from the root n-y-t and nāta. In Lane nāta, yanītu, nayt and nāta, yanūtu, nawt mean the same: he swayed from side to side in walking, as the sailor turns his vessel from side to side; and the nūtiyy is the sailor who turns the ship about at sea. This is what Neith does in the Esna account: she becomes a cow, carries Re between her horns and swims with him through the first water to Sais. The essay gives the root the sense of weaving, which Lane does not record for these letters; but the to-and-fro that Lane does record is the movement of the shuttle across the threads of the loom, and Neith is the goddess who invented weaving. That link is our proposal on the method.

Linguistic Root

Nāta and the nūtiyy

In Egyptian spelling the name is n and y, then the feminine t, and it may be written without the y. The Egyptian dictionary has two words with its letters minus the y: n.t, the Red Crown that Neith wears, and n.t, water and flood. The Global Egyptian Museum notes that Neith was equated with Mehet-weret, the heavenly cow, through her link with the primeval water. Egyptian itself thus gathers the crown and the water under these letters, two of Neith's faces, though the dictionary does not show the name derived from either.

The Egyptian essay reads the name from n-y-t, saying it means weaving, and then from nāta, saying it means extension, and grades the reading "high". Neither sense is in Lane for these letters. What Lane gives is that nāta, yanītu, nayt and nāta, yanūtu, nawt mean swaying from side to side, from weakness or drowsiness, "as the sailor turns the vessel from side to side", and that the nūtiyy and nawwāt is the sailor who turns the ship about at sea; he adds that al-Jawharī takes the word from the speech of Syria and others make it an arabicised form of Greek ναύτης. The verb nāta itself is Arabic and needs no such source.

The reading takes the three letters as they stand: n is n, y is y, t is t, as the Greeks kept them in Νηίθ. But in the Egyptian spelling the t is the feminine ending, and if it is removed as it is from the name of Nut, a name of n and y remains. That is the open point of the reading: was the t part of the name for those who named her, as in nāta, or an ending? Lane, n-y-t, Lane, n-w-t.

Other readings

The Egyptian essay compares weaving with Hebrew אורג, ʾōrēg, weaver, a word of other letters. The project's Roman essay sets Neith beside Minerva and Athena as goddesses of wisdom, weaving and war, and reads Minerva's name from nūr, light.

Key Mythic Narratives

The seven utterances of Mehet-weret

The Esna text says that seven utterances came from Neith's mouth and became seven divine beings who guard Mehet-weret wherever she goes. The Global Egyptian Museum glosses that name as "the great flood", and Elli, following the Berlin dictionary, as "the great swimmer": the cow that carries the sun between her horns in the first water. Michèle Broze studies how the text is built around these seven utterances and shows that the goddess's thought, joined to her speech, brings about what she says.

Mother of Sobek and partner of Seth

The Global Egyptian Museum says that from the Old Kingdom Neith was regarded as Seth's partner and mother of Sobek, the crocodile. The Pyramid Texts name the two together: "Seth and Neith are content." In the Hymn to Hapy "Sobk, Neith's child, bares his teeth" when the flood comes. With Khnum at Esna she was held a creator, "father and mother of everything", so that some texts make the two one androgynous god.

Sais in Herodotus

Herodotus calls Neith "Athena". He counts her feast at Sais as the third of Egypt's great festivals, and at its "Feast of Lamps" people keep lamps of salt and oil burning all night around their houses on the night of sacrifice, at Sais and throughout Egypt. Her temple holds the tombs of the Saite kings and, behind the shrine, the burial place of "one whose name I think it impious to mention", with a round lake on which the god's sufferings are enacted by night; the Global Egyptian Museum identifies these as the Osiris passion play and the tomb as Osiris's. King Amasis brought her from Elephantine a shrine cut from a single block, which two thousand men hauled for three years.

The robe no one has lifted

Plutarch, in the second century CE, reports that the statue of Athena at Sais, "whom they believe to be Isis", bore the inscription: "I am all that has been, and is, and shall be, and my robe no mortal has yet uncovered." Plato says that the people of Sais call the founder of their city Neith in Egyptian and Athena in Greek, and that they love the Athenians and count them kin.

Symbolic Reading

The project's Egyptian rereading essay does not treat Neith. The texts set her in two places people know: the great mother to whom one turns when the men cannot judge, and the weaver. Her letter in the Contendings does what a grandmother does in a household: it gives the son his right, compensates the stronger brother with property and wives so that no grudge is left, and threatens anger if she is not heard. The linen she taught people to weave is both the garment of the living and the wrapping of the dead; that is why Sais, as the Global Egyptian Museum notes, had a reputation for weaving and for surgery, and was one of the places to which the dead travelled in the burial rites.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

In the Esna account Neith comes out of the primordial waters and makes in their midst a land to lean on, as Atum rises on the first mound at Iunu. Men come from Re's tears and gods from his spittle, an account of the creation of humans. Apophis comes from her spittle and rebels against her son, so the same account begins the war of sun and serpent told under chaoskampf. In Sumer Namma was the first mother who bore heaven and earth, her name written with the sign of the cosmic water, and in Babylon Tiamat bears monsters to fight the young gods; the difference is that at Esna Apophis is not made by Neith's will but is her spittle driven out, which becomes the enemy of her son.

The divine council in Egypt seeks Neith's judgment as the council at Ugarit seeks that of El, but the Egyptian council appeals to a mother who writes and does not appear. Her letter calls the Levantine Anat and Astarte daughters of Re, an early witness to Levantine goddesses entering an Egyptian genealogy.

Plato and Herodotus say that Neith is Athena; both are warrior maidens who teach weaving, and the Roman essay sets her beside Minerva. Her invention of weaving places her among the culture heroes credited with the crafts on which people's lives rest.