Meskhenet

Summary

Meskhenet is the Egyptian goddess of birth, and at root she is the brick on which a woman gives birth. Josef Wegner explains that Egyptians placed special bricks, called msḫn.t, to support a woman squatting during delivery, and that the notion of the birth brick was given divine form as the goddess Meskhenet. In 2001 his excavation in the mayoral residence at South Abydos found an unfired mud birth brick 36 cm long, from about 1750 to 1700 BCE, painted with a mother and newborn seated on a throne and flanked by images of Hathor. Wegner, "The Magical Birth Brick", Expedition 48, 2006, Egyptian dictionary, Meskhenet.

Her great story is in the Westcar papyrus, a collection of Middle Kingdom tales. Ruddedet, wife of a priest of Ra of Sakhbu, is in labour and the birth is hard; in her womb are three sons who will be kings. Ra says to Isis, Nephthys, Meskhenet, Heqet and Khnum: "Please go, deliver Ruddedet of the three children who are in her womb, who will assume this beneficent office in this whole land. They will build your temples, they will supply your altars, they will make your offerings abundant!" The goddesses disguise themselves as dancing girls, with Khnum as their porter, go in to the woman and lock the room. Isis stands before her, Nephthys behind her, Heqet hastens the birth, and the child slides into Isis's arms, a child of one cubit, strong boned, his limbs overlaid with gold; they wash him, cut his navel cord and lay him on a pillow of cloth. "Then Meskhenet approached him and said: A king who will assume the kingship in this whole land", and Khnum gives health to his body. This happens three times, once for each son.

So Meskhenet's work in the story is to say what the child will be. Isis receives him, Heqet hastens his coming, Khnum gives him health, and Meskhenet alone speaks his destiny. That is why she appears in the images of the Book of the Dead at the reckoning: in the vignette of chapter 125 in the Turin papyrus she is among the deities standing before Thoth at the balance, and chapter 142 names "the four Meskhenets who are in Abydos". In the Pyramid Texts, spell 667, the dead king is told: "Raise your face and look at Meskhenet, your mother, who made your coming forth possible." Egyptian dictionary, Meskhenet, Global Egyptian Museum, Shai.

The idea Meskhenet turns on is that the place of birth is the place of destiny. The brick on which the mother sits is where the newborn's future is spoken, and it is the same figure who stands at the balance when he is judged at the end of his life. A person begins at Meskhenet and ends there.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Egyptian writes it Msḫn.t, which is the word msḫn.t itself, meaning in the Egyptian dictionary "abode", "birthplace" and "birth bricks". The project's Egyptian essay reads it from masaka, "to hold", because the midwife holds the child, grading this reading "very likely", together with khanna, the moaning of the mother, or masaḥa. The essay's first three letters, m, s and k, are the letters of the Egyptian word. The whole word in Arabic is maskan: the m is the m of place, as in Egyptian m- is a prefix that makes nouns of place, and what remains is sḫn, which in Egyptian is a resting place, its verb meaning to alight and settle. In Lane sakana is said of a thing that became still and at rest after motion, and maskan is a place of alighting, abiding and dwelling, a house. On this reading Meskhenet is al-maskina, the place where the woman settles and gives birth, with the feminine t.

Linguistic Root

Maskan, the dwelling place

The Egyptian essay calls Meskhenet the goddess of birth and fate and reads her from masaka, "to hold", the midwife who holds the child, grading this "very likely", together with khanna, the mother's moaning in labour, so that Meskhenet is "the touch and the moan". In second place it puts masaḥa, "to wipe", with ḥ for kh. The Roman essay names her among its comparisons for Lucina, the Roman goddess who brings the child into the light, as a goddess of birth who receives children.

The essay's reading hits the first three letters: m and s, then Egyptian ḫ in the place of k. It also hits the image of the midwife. But the Egyptian dictionary makes the m a prefix, so that the stem is sḫn, n included, and the masaka reading needs a second word, khanna, for the n.

The proposed reading takes the whole word as one, on the pattern mafʿal: m is the m of place, s is s, Egyptian ḫ is k, n is n, and t is the feminine ending. The meaning is the same in both languages: Egyptian sḫn is a resting place and sḫn.t a bed of rest, the verb means to alight and settle, and msḫn is an abode of gods. In Lane sakana is said of a thing that became still after motion, and maskan is a place of alighting and abiding, a house or a tent. In Hebrew miškān is a dwelling and the tabernacle, from š-k-n with š. The birth brick is a maskan, the place the woman comes down upon and settles on until she gives birth. So the two readings meet: masaka reads what the midwife does, maskan reads the place where it is done, and the first three letters are the same.

The limit of the reading is that Egyptian ḫ stands where Arabic and Hebrew have k, and no second Egyptian-Semitic pair with these two letters is yet known.

Symbolic Reading

The Egyptian rereading essay says the Egyptians did not worship objects but made their images into tools for explaining their lives. The birth brick is a clear case: a tool of mud that every household made becomes a goddess, because the most dangerous hour in the life of mother and child takes place on it. So Hathor was painted on it, and the mother was painted on a throne: the woman who gives birth on the brick sits, in the picture, as a queen sits.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Among the Greeks the Moirai allot each person a share of life on the day of birth, and Homer says Moira spun Hector's thread "on the day I bore him". Among the Norse the norns come to every child that is born to shape its life, as Snorri says. Meskhenet, like them, stands by the newborn and speaks its destiny; she differs in that she neither spins nor carves on wood but speaks, and in that she is herself the brick on which the child is born.

At Ugarit the Kotharat, the skilful ones, are goddesses of birth for whom Danel holds a feast of seven days before a son is born to him; see the Kotharat.

In Egypt itself Meskhenet stands with Taweret and Bes by the bed of the woman in labour, and with Shai, the god who fixes a person's lifetime, at the balance of the judgment of the dead.