Air Commodore P. J. Wiseman, a British officer who visited many active archaeological sites during his career in the Middle East, found that ancient narrative tablets usually ended in colophons which had a very specific format consisting of three parts: 1) "this has been the history/book/genealogy of..."; 2) the name of the person who wrote or owned the tablet; and 3) a date (such as "in the year of the great earthquake" or "the 3rd year of king so-and-so," etc.).
"[2] R. K. Harrison in his Introduction to the Old Testament wrote approvingly of [Wiseman's] approach which "had the distinct advantage of relating the ancient Mesopotamian sources underlying Genesis to an authentic Mesopotamian life-situation, unlike the attempts of the Graf–Wellhausen school, and showed that the methods of writing and compilation employed in Genesis were in essential harmony with the processes current among the scribes of ancient Babylonia.
"[3] Harrison noted that these examples had been discounted by scholars who follow Wellhausen and the Documentary hypothesis, since the central basis of the Documentary hypothesis is that the Pentateuch is mostly a work composed by unknown editors and authors who lived much later than the time of Moses.
[4] Donald Wiseman noted in the foreword to the revised edition of his father's book that since it had first been written (1936) many more colophons have been discovered among Babylonian cuneiform texts[5][6] which substantiated the use of this scribal device.
Texts from Syria and Mesopotamia[7] show continuity in tradition of scribal education and literary practices for more than two millennia, giving fixed and dated points.