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Health and wellbeing in the ancient world
Health and wellbeing in the ancient world

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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.

Small image made by a stamp into clay of an Etruscan woman giving birth standing up.
Figure _unit5.2.1 Figure 8 Etruscan woman giving birth standing up
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Photograph of a small image made by pressing a stamp into clay, depicting an Etruscan woman giving birth standing up.

Figure 8 Etruscan woman giving birth standing up

Activity _unit5.2.1 Activity 3

  1. 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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  1. 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 [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] 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.