 The extant corpus of tablets comprising "mîs-pî" consist of two ritual accounts, one late Babylonian and one earlier Assyrian, together with several Sumerian incantations to be recited at the various stages of the ritual, recovered from a wide distribution of find spots.These date from the eighth to the fifth centuries BC and are thought to have been arranged on 6 or 8 tablets.Although these texts are from the first millennium BC, a reference to a ritual of the opening of the mouth of a statue of the deified statue of Gudea may represent an earlier recension, and mouth-washing is mentioned during the middle Babylonian period.