Hedvig Győry: Mélanges offerts a Edith Varga „Le lotus qui sort de terre” (Bulletin du Musée Hongrois des Beaux-Arts Supplément 1. Budapest, 2001)
HANS GOEDICKE: Anthropological Problems - Gynecological Questions
the party "standing with his loincloth upside down." They try to calm him down, but he is not to be easily distracted: "My ladies, look, it is the woman who is in pain; her labor is difficult!" It is at this point that they offer their services, "Let us see her! We understand childbirth!" It must have come as a relief to Rawoser to have encountered such unexpected help and so he promptly invites them, "Come />?!", which they follow. So they go inside to Rudjedet and "they locked the room behind themselves and her" leaving the distraught prospective father outside. What follows is a detailed description of the actual delivery of each of the three children. 5 Although the party was originally made up of five, four females and one male, only three women take part in the actual delivery, one standing behind the laboring one, one in front of her and one who is said to have "hastened the birth." The role of each one is quite clear,' 1 one holding the woman from behind, one apparently massaging her womb and the third, it is Isis, ready to accept the delivered child. In each case it is described as "a child of one cubit, strong boned, his limbs overlaid with gold, his headdress of true lapis lazuli." One wanted to see in this description a reflection of the miraculous nature of these children, even their superhuman origin or nature, claiming Re' as their father, who engendered them. But is this really warranted by the text? 7 All it says is that each of the children was one cubit long, which seems to have been more or less the usual size. That they were "strong boned" is nothing else than describing the important fact that they were not crippled but of normal build. The gold-colored limbs are not a reflection of divine descent, but the proof that they were healthy and not "blue babies". Their "headdress of true lapis lazuli" is also no sign of divinity, but rather a description that they had a tuft of blue-black hair and not the dreaded red hair due to bilharzia. In short, the features described about each of the newborn babies were nothing else than their characterization as normal healthy children. But what did the two other members of the party, namely Meskhenet and Khnum, do in the meantime? Meskhenet does not take part in the actual delivery; she rather approaches the baby after it is washed, its umbilical cord cut and it is "laid on a pillow of cloth." She clearly performs no midwife job, but when s Cf. H. Goedicke, Rudjet's Delivery, VA 1 (1985), pp. 19-26. 6 F. Wcindler, Geburts- und Wochenbettdarstellungen auf altägyptischen Tempelreliefs, München 1915, pp. 37f. ' Cf. H. Goedicke, GM 39 (1980), pp. 28f.
