Neith was usually portrayed holding two arrows and a bow. Sometimes her headdress was the crown of Lower Egypt, or the sign for her name, or two crossed arrows. In another guise, during dynastic times, she was depicted as a woman with a crocodile suckling at each breast, perhaps indicating that she had life-giving power over the river Nile.

Her attributes suggest that originally, Neith was a wood-spirit. Judging from early texts, her worship had become very general throughout Egypt. She was certainly worshipped during the earliest dynastic time, and according to some scholars, the fact that her name formed a component of royal names very early in the 1st dynasty indicated that her worship dated from the first half of the archaic period. She was cited as goddess of Saïs in the ‘Pyramid Text' of Unas. In later texts she appeared in the Underworld (Duat) as the protector goddess of Duamutef, one of Horus's four sons who were represented on the canopic jars as guardians of the jar's contents, which were the internal organs of a mummy.