Old Babylonian laments (Balaŋs, Eršemmas, and Eršahuŋas) have rarely been subject of research by themselves. The many publications of Emesal texts by Mark Cohen, Stefan Maul, Uri Gabbay, Daisuke Shibata, and others from the last 40 years either focused on first millennium resources (quoting Old Babylonian parallels where appropriate), or mixed materials from various origins and periods into composite texts. This situation changed substantially with the appearance of Paul Delnero's How to do Things with Tears [https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501512650] (2020), which includes a full catalog of all known Emesal texts from the Old Babylonian period and a thorough discussion of unorthographic writing - a phenomenon that is common in Old Babylonian laments, but much less so in later sources. This book paved the way for approaching the Old Babylonian laments for their own sake, and providing editions of all known sources.
The Old Babylonian Emesal corpus includes not only laments, but also texts that have been characterized as love songs, often of a very explicit sexual nature. Unlike the laments, this latter category of texts was not continued after the Old Babylonian period. For that reason, they are often treated as a separate category, or included among the Sumerian literary texts. Emesal texts were used by so-called gala priests (kalû in Akkadian) who, in the preceding Ur III period, were involved in major life events such as death and marriage (see Michalowski 2006 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/40025223]). Since "love songs" and "laments" from the period share many features (such as the use of Emesal, but also weak standardization with frequent use of standard phraseology) the working hypothesis of the OBEL project is that the two groups belong together as a single corpus.
Other Old Babylonian texts that use Emesal are excluded from the OBEL corpus. This group includes narrative texts in which female characters are quoted speaking in Emesal (for instance in Inana's Descent [https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=c.1.4.1& display=Crit& charenc=gcirc#] or in Gilgameš, Enkidu and the Netherworld) [https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=c.1.8.1.4& display=Crit& charenc=gcirc#], a good number of proverbs (for instance in the school text HAG 03 [/epsd2/literary/P382664]), and the City Laments [https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=c.2.2*#].
A good number of Old Babylonian Emesal texts use unorthographic writings. Usually, such texts are very difficult to understand, except in those cases where phraseology is used that is also known from orthographic examples. One example out of many is the list of epithets of Inana in TIM 9, 31 [/obel/P223457]
This text includes unorthographic writings such as ka-ša-an (for ga-ša-an), u₃-nu-qa-ke (for unug-ga-ke₄), di-te (for di-de₃), etcetera.