Health and wellbeing in the ancient world
2 Giving birth
Every culture has its own expectations about positions for giving birth and who is allowed to be present. In this section, you’ll explore what these expectations were in ancient Greece and Rome.
Figure 8 Etruscan woman giving birth standing up
Small image made by a stamp into clay of an Etruscan woman giving birth standing up.
Activity 3
- There are many images (statuettes, paintings, etc.) of woman giving birth from ancient cultures around the world. Use the internet to find some of these images, and note down which societies they came from, where they were found, and why they might have been made. Do the images depict birth in the same manner or are they different?
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- What is the most common birthing position in your country? Does it differ from what is represented by the ancient images you found?
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The blog post RTI of Etruscan Bucchero Fragments at Poggio Colla describes how a new form of imaging made it possible to see the image on the piece of pottery shown in Figure 8, from an Etruscan site, more clearly.
OpenLearn - Health and wellbeing in the ancient world
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