One of the common hieroglyphs for birth shows a woman squatting over an
object while a baby emerges from her. The object is shaped like a
rectangle the top of which is a concave arc (very similar to the glyph
for mountains). This would seem to indicate that at some point "birthing
stones" were in common use.
I would be very interested in any explanation of the exact function of
the object or why they might be called "stones" in Exodus.
Colin Smith
Baptist Bible College
csmith AT bbc.edu