Dear Sir,
Back in the April issue of en, Martin Haywood wrote concerning Genesis 1-11. He says that he does not know of any scholar who thinks the Genesis text is of greater antiquity than c.1600 BC. He has clearly not read Clues to Creation In Genesis, by Squadron Leader P. J. Wiseman (edited by his son, Professor D. J. Wiseman, and republished by Marshall Morgan and Scott in 1977).
P. J. Wiseman was a British archaeologist and Babylonian expert; in the 1920s and 1930s he translated many clay tablets dating from circa 3000 BC. He drew attention to the 11 colophons (‘These are the generations of …) in Genesis, pointing out that the Sumerians placed a colophon at the end of a series of tablets, referring back to the ‘top’ and noting the writer or owner.
