Its purpose was to cleanse the person of the Assyrian king, and his household, of the evils portended by the inauspicious sign of a lunar eclipse, witchcraft, ritual abuse, etc.[1] The correspondence of Esarhaddon with his priests Adad-šumu-uṣur, Urad-Ea, Marduk-šākin-šumi, and Nabû-nāṣir shows that he was subjected to this ceremony on four separate occasions, while masquerading as a "farmer", in an elaborate substitute-king ritual. The Assyrian king of Babylon, Šamaš-šum-ukin, endured two such rituals where fresh copies of the incantation tablets were laboriously prepared.