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.
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.
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.
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...