Meskhenet
Egyptian · deity · mythic · deity
Meskhenet is a brick. Egyptian women gave birth squatting on a pair of mud bricks, and the brick is the goddess — her hieroglyph is a brick with a human head on it, and one painted example survives from Middle Kingdom Abydos with a mother and child on the face of it. She speaks the child's fate as it arrives, which in the Westcar Papyrus she does out loud for three future kings. And she turns up again at the other end, in the judgement hall, which gives an Egyptian life a pleasing symmetry: the same goddess is present at the first breath and at the weighing of the heart.
Domains
- childbirth
- fate
Relations
- counterpart of: Shai
Sources
- Reference treatments of Meskhenet, the birth brick and the Egyptian birth-and-fate triad.