The OBEL project started with a group of a little over 100 Emesal liturgies that Steve Tinney had collected from various resources for use in ePSD2 [/epsd2]. Some of these editions were simply copied from existing (print) publications, others were carefully collated from the originals by Steve. Today, these editions are still available in epsd2/praxis/liturgy [/epsd2/praxis/liturgy], but they will gradually be replaced by OBEL editions.
Fall 2021 was the start of the Academy of Finland project The Origins of Emesal by Krister Lindén and Aleksi Sahala (University of Helsinki). The project utilizes ORACC data, in particular the first millennium laments edited in the electronic Innsbruck Sumerian Lexicon [/eisl] and the various Emesal texts and passages in literary texts and proverbs, available in the Datenbank sumerischer Streitliteratur [/dsst], among the collection of literary texts in ePSD2 [/epsd2/literary] and at various other places in ORACC. The corpus of Old Babylonian laments was by far the largest gap in the available electronic resources.
A team consisting of Niek Veldhuis (UC Berkeley), Steve Tinney (University of Pennsylvania), Aleksi Sahala (University of Helsinki), Noah Kröll (University of Innsbruck), and Sebastian Fink (University of Innsbruck) started revising and updating the material that had been collected for ePSD2.
From the start the foundation of the OBEL project was formed by the catalog of Old Babylonian Emesal laments by Paul Delnero (Johns Hopkins University) published in SANER 26 [https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501512650]. In 2022 Paul Delnero generously offered the project his working transliterations (sometimes including translations) and photographs of all the Old Babylonian Emesal laments known to him. This data set includes numerous identifications of unorthographic writings.
The OBEL team is currently working on transforming Delnero's transliterations and translations to ORACC standards while adding lemmatization. A Stahl grant from the Archaeological Research Facility [https://arf.berkeley.edu/] at UC Berkeley allowed Dylan Guerra and Jason Moser to work on the corpus Summer 2024. A Mellon Project Grant [https://artshumanities.berkeley.edu/mellon-project-grant-mpg] will support further work by Dylan and Jason Spring 2025.