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+Neit+ was a goddess of the Libyan people; but her worship was firmly implanted by them in Egypt. She was a goddess of hunting and of weaving, the two arts of a nomadic people. Her emblem was a distaff with two crossed arrows, and her name was written with a figure of a weaver's shuttle.
We now turn to the deities which are always represented in human form, and never associated with animal figures; neither do they originate in a cosmic or nature worship, nor in abstract ideas. There are three divisions of this class, the Osiris family, the Amon family, and the goddess Neit. We cannot doubt but that the Osiris worship reaches back to the prehistoric age.
In the Khordah Avesta, praise is offered to "the Moon which contains the seed of cattle, to the only begotten Bull, to the Bull of many kinds." Perhaps the most widely diffused and universally adored representation of the ancient female Deity in Egypt was the Virgin Neit or Neith, the Athene of the Greeks and the Minerva of the Romans. Her name signifies "I came from myself."
It stood, and indeed still stands, on a piled-up mound without the walls near to the temple of the goddess Neit, who always has her habitation to the north of the wall, why I do not know, because even her priests cannot tell me.
It is true that Bast, Neit, and Taurt are counted by some as foreign; but deities who are found from the pyramid times to the Roman age, and who were the patrons of capitals and of dynasties, must be counted as Egyptian; and of Taurt we do not know of any foreign source, nor should we look for any, as the hippopotamus abounded in Egypt itself.
She was adored in the first dynasty, when the name Merneit, 'loved by Neit, occurs; and her priesthood was one of the most usual in the pyramid period. She was almost lost to sight during some thousands of years, but she became the state goddess of the twenty-sixth dynasty, when the Libyans set up their capital in her city of Sais. In later times she again disappears from customary religion.
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