You're mistaken. We have carvings that are older than the 2000+ year old Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS), but it may be inaccurate to refer to cave carvings and inscriptions as "documents."

But even if you classify stone and clay carvings as documents, the statement is nonetheless true: the DSS are "some of the oldest surviving documents on earth." There are some fragments that are older (e.g. a clay fragment found in Jerusalem [0] dating to 1400 BC), yet the DSS remain as some of the oldest surviving documents in existence, and they comprise more than a mere fragment. For example, the DSS contains almost all the books of Psalms (the longest book of the Bible) and several copies of Isaiah.

This is an interesting find because it suggests there are more caves than previously believed, which may produce additional ancient witnesses to the historic texts of the Bible and other Jewish religious documents.

[0]: http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Oldest-written-document-ever-fou...

The Code of Hammurabi survives in virtually complete form on a stele and pips the Dead Sea Scrolls by 1500 years or so. A reasonably complete version of the Epic of Gilgamesh is 1000 years or so older than the Dead Sea Scrolls.

So it's by no means the earliest essentially-complete collection of manuscripts found. That said, it is still in sparse company. As far as I can tell, the next major complete manuscript are a few copies of the Bible dating to mid-4th century. Complete versions of things like the Odyssey and the Iliad date only to around 1000.

Right - the DSS isn't the oldest document, but it is among the oldest surviving documents.

This is what the article claimed: the DSS are "some of the oldest surviving documents on earth."

You're mistaken. There is a sizable amount of extant Akkadian, Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, and Chinese literature from well before when the TaNaK was written. In fact of each of those languages have a sum of extant literature that surpasses, in volume, the largess of writing in the Bible.

You've misinterpreted what I'm saying.

Again, the article stated a simple truth: the DSS are "some of the oldest surviving documents on earth."

That is a factually true statement.

The parent commenter objected to this statement. I corrected him.

Now you are trying to correct me by saying there is a some surviving literature from before the Bible was written. I've made no claim otherwise.

Several people have asked what the poster is referring to here. The poster is correct:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform_script

> Between half a million[3] and two million cuneiform tablets are estimated to have been excavated in modern times, of which only approximately 30,000[4] – 100,000 have been read or published.

The fact that so few have been translated thus far is pretty amazing.

Millions? Where?

What documents?

Cuneiform tablets make up the largest source of older writings. Millions might be a stretch, since the only numbers I could find added up to 500K tablets, and tablets ≠ texts.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are dated to ~200BC-AD100, which appears to be roughly contemporaneous with the oldest extant Chinese manuscript fragments.

Note that this is assuming that you're counting the dates of the manuscripts themselves, not the dates of texts being composed. There's a lot of texts in Greek and Latin known to be older, but they are known only from fourth- or fifth-hand copies in manuscripts dating back usually to later than AD600.

> tablets ≠ texts

C'mon now. Sumerian tablets are documents, we're not talking about ticket stubs.

Here's some long form examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gudea_cylinders

>The Gudea cylinders are a pair of terracotta cylinders dating to circa 2125 BC, on which is written in cuneiform a Sumerian myth called the Building of Ningursu's temple.[1] The cylinders were made by Gudea, the ruler of Lagash, and were found in 1877 during excavations at Telloh (ancient Girsu), Iraq and are now displayed in the Louvre in Paris, France. They are the largest cuneiform cylinders yet discovered and contain the longest known text written in the Sumerian language.

> C'mon now. Sumerian tablets are documents, we're not talking about ticket stubs.

Oh, I know. I was just making reference to the fact that something like the Epic of Gilgamesh might be on several tablets.

Thanks pointing that out. It is easy to fall into the hype of written press.

But it is also easy to fall for pithy contrarian posts on HN! The dead sea scrolls are among the oldest documents. Notable they are the oldest version of books of the Hebrew bible. Many important texts which we think are older (like Plato, Homer etc.) are only known from transcriptions which are much more recent than then dead sea scrolls.

I thought the same thing. :)

I'm sure there are lots of people associated with this discovery that would be happy to sweep those older documents under the rug and forget about them.

Why? Does age somehow imply truth value?

It does if you go around saying that educated civilization, or even earth itself didn't exist back then.

To my knowledge, even the most extreme Young Earth Creationists believe the Earth predates these scrolls by ~6,000 years.

What people are you talking about? Archaeologist? Bedouins?