Foreign Pots @museum.de

M: Evidence of the custom of afterbirth burial is found virtually all over the world. In Egypt more than 5,000 years ago, it involved special rituals. More evidence was found in China, dating back to the first millennium BC. And one of the most important Jewish texts, the Talmud, also mentions burying of the afterbirth.

F: In this display case, dealing with "Global Customs", we have an afterbirth pot from New Zealand on display. It's labelled as number 1 and was made by the New Zealand artist Manus Nathan. He decorated it with "mokomoko", lizards. They're emblems of the tribe to which Nathan belongs. The crescent-shaped opening is reminiscent of the patron god of the female sex.

M: Next to it are two objects from Russia used to bury the placenta. One is a box and the other a slipper. Both are made of birch bark. Both objects originated among the Vepsians, for whom the birch tree was sacred. The Vepsians, or Veps, are a Finno-Ugric ethnic group that lives in the north-west of Russia.

F: Object number 4 is from Cameroon in central Africa. There, making a pot for the afterbirth traditionally falls to the midwife, and she then buries both the pot and its contents. The final object, number five, takes us to Asia, to Myanmar, formerly Burma.