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Birth in 11th Century Cambodia

Today I am going to try something new - I am going to give you a picture!

During my recent holiday I was fortunate to spend time in Cambodia, exploring the ruins of Ankor Wat and Ankor Thom (amongst a number of other temples). Both were quite amazing, for their size, vision, inspiration and beauty and the surrounding area, near Siem Reap in the north of the country is still delightfully rural (although that is about to change fast as the multitude of big tourist hotels under construction start to fill up with visitors.

I was particularly looking forward to locating the birth scenes carved into the stone as part of the temple walls that surround the Bayon Temple inside Ankor Thom. I has been alerted to their existence some years ago by an Australian midwife who was working in the area on an aid project.

The Bayon Temple is about 900 metres square, surrounded by a roofed gallery. One side of this gallery is open to the outside and the other wall is decorated with beautifully preserved intricate stone carvings, that run along the entire length of the complex. They are divided into three sections - the main middle section depicts either battles that have been fought or religious stories with a Buddhist flavour. The bottom section contains scenes of everyday life of the people of the time (11th Century).

Amongst the scenes of eating, hunting, farming, buying and selling, family life etc there is this tableau showing birth:

The father is on the left, heading out of the house with his mate, to hunt with bow and arrow. Inside the house, the women gather around the labouring woman who is in an upright supported squatting position. The midwife is attending to her needs. It all looks very straightforward.

Home birth is obviously the norm!

(Love this new picture facility!)

Posted by andrea at January 14, 2004 12:57 PM

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