Birth Bricks, Potter’s Wheels, and Exodus 1,16 315 of the Dead (25), in spell 125, Meshkenet is depicted in this manner. Indeed Budge labels two line-drawings of Meshkenet as a birth brick with the caption “The Two Birth Stones”, with µynbah and Exodus 1,16 (26). Budge is not normally a trustworthy source. However, in this situation his suggestion seems to be correct. So to repeat the context of use of these bricks in the Westcar papyrus, after birth the child is placed on the bricks, with a cushion in between. Once there, Meshkenet proclaims him king of the land and Khnum breathes life into him. From this literary account, it seems that after birth in Egypt the child was placed on bricks and likely some sort of ritual took place. The baby was physically placed upon the bricks. This helps our reading of Exodus 1,16, where the midwives are told to (µynbah-l[ ˆtarw) “look upon the ’obnayim”. If we take the ’obnayim as the bricks where the baby is placed after the umbilical cord is cut, we no longer have any interpretative problem. Positing the word as a dual form, one should expect the reference to be to two bricks. The perspective of the preposition l[ “upon” makes sense in this context and Propp’s concerns about the presence of this preposition here are solved. Indeed, if one takes ’obnayim to refer to this kind of equipment, then the passage in Exodus makes easy sense. The midwives are told to look upon the bricks and if the baby is male kill it, and if female let it live. In the Westcar papyrus it is while the baby rests on the bricks that its fate is determined (to be king of Egypt) and Khnum breathes life into it. So it is fitting from a literary perspective that the king of Egypt orders that the life or death of the Hebrew children be determined while on this brick. These bricks are not mere literary conventions. A brick of this nature was unearthed in 2000, in the William Kelly Simpson Pennsylvania-Yale excavations at Abydos. This is the only actual birth brick to be recovered archaeologically (27). Led by Dr. Josef Wegner of the University of Pennsylvania, the Penn team recovered the brick while excavating the Middle Kingdom town in South Abydos. The (25) The best example comes from the Papyrus of Ani (see planche 3 in G. RACHET, Le Livre des Morts des Anciens Égyptiens [Paris 1996]), although a schematic depiction of Meshkenet as a birth brick can be found in a Book of the Dead in the Egyptian Museum in Turin (ROTH – ROEHRIG, “Magical Bricks and the Bricks of Birth”, 130). (26) E. BUDGE, From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt (New York 1988) 61. (27) J. WEGNER, “A Decorated Birth-Brick from South Abydos”, in Egyptian Archaeology 20 (Spring, 2002) 3-4.