CHAPTER 8 – MĪS PÎ
The Text
The ritual of mīs pî, “washing the mouth,” was an ancient Mesopotamian cultic practice
by which material representations of deities, namely three dimensional statues, were im-
bued with divine presence before being stationed in their respective temples. While the
practice of inducting a manufactured image of a deity for worship in a temple is known
from the third millennium B.C.E., cuneiform sources for the textual form of the ritual
come only from the first millennium B.C.E.^676 The mouth washing ritual consists of a list
of instructions, which also has placed throughout it the incipits of incantations that are to
be read at certain times throughout the rite. The full incantations are contained in a sepa-
rate series of tablets.
The ritual exists in two major recensions, each having a slightly different order of ritual
acts and a differing number of incantations. The divergences in the recensions are seen
most readily in the differences between the ritual tablets from Nineveh and tablets from
Babylon.^677 The entire series as we have it is composed of eight incantation tablets at
Nineveh, six at Babylon, and in each a final tablet that supplies instructions for perform-
(^676) See the summary of the evidence in P.J. Boden, (^) The Mesopotamian Washing of the Mouth (mīs pî) Rit-
ual: An Examination of Some of the Social and Communication Strategies which Guided the Development
and Performance of the Ritual which Transferred the Essence of the Deity into Its Temple Statue (The John
Hopkins University Ph.D. Dissertation: 1998) 12-18, and also C.B.F. Walker and M.B. Dick, "The Induc-
tion of the Cult Image in Ancient Mesopotamia: The Mesopotamian mīs pî Ritual," Born in Heaven, Made
on Earth: The Making of the Cult Image in the Ancient Near East (ed. M.B. Dick; Winona Lake: Eisen-
brauns, 1999) 67-68. 677
C.B.F. Walker and M.B. Dick, "The Induction of the Cult Image," 70-71.