I never heard of just two bricks supporting the woman giving birth--but why
not? And why two stones can have done the job just as well is obvious.
Mystery solved. Thank you, Joseph. The business with the knife survived for
many
years. In AE it was used to threaten evil spirits that might hover about the
birthing process, but in much later times in other cultures a knife was
placed
under the mattress when a woman was in labor--supposedly to "cut the
pain"--but perhaps by then no one knew any longer what the knife was really
for but its
presence at birth was obviously a thing of great antiquity.