When a woman of Egypt came to the hour of childbirth, she squatted upon two bricks of clay laid one beside the other, that the child might come down upon them and be received. These were the meskhent, the birthing-bricks, and they were not mere objects: into them, in the moment of birth, came the goddess Meskhenet, who was the brick made divine. She it was who beheld the newborn and pronounced its fate, declaring at the very threshold of life what kind of life this should be.

In the great romance preserved upon the Westcar Papyrus, when the wife of a priest of Ra was about to give birth to the three sons who would become the first kings of the Fifth Dynasty, the gods themselves came down to attend her: Isis stood before her, Nephthys behind, Heqet the frog-goddess hastened the labor, and Meskhenet stood by to fix the destiny of each child. As each son was lifted from the brick, Meskhenet pronounced upon him: 'A king who shall reign in this land.' So the futures of three pharaohs were spoken at the moment they drew their first breath.

She was depicted as a woman whose head was the strange double-headed cow uterus that served as her hieroglyphic emblem, or more often as a birthing-brick personified, the brick standing upright and crowned with a woman's face. In the Hall of Judgment she had a second office: she stood beside the scales of Maat, for the destiny that she had spoken at birth must now be measured against the life that had followed. Thus she presided at both ends of the human course, the beginning and the reckoning.