The oldest human statues in the world were found in Amman. They are 7500 years old. The shapes were made out of reed and then covered in plaster. They think the lack of detail between the head and the feet might be because the statue used to wear clothes.
This one is weird because it has two heads.
The black on the eyes is bitumen from the Dead Sea. Which is a long walk from Amman.
They also covered the skulls of the dead with plaster and put shells in their eyes.
These coffins came much later and were probably inspired by the Egyptian sarcophagus. They had a representation of the face on top, you can barely see the nose sticking out now.
This is the dead sea scroll that was made out of bronze. It is basically an ancient treasure map.
It didn’t last very well. It corroded and couldn’t be unrolled, and most of the letters are hard to read.
But the papyrus isn’t much better. This is some document about the rules of the community.
And the parchment has bigger intact chunks but also more chunks missing. This is a pesser, which is kind of a written version of a sermon.
You should definitely carve things into stone if you want them to be readable 2000 years later.
