Books are an interesting analogy: We do have books and scrolls that are hundreds of years old. And technically, those books did "deteriorate": The colors faded, pages were damaged or went missing, the whole book became much more sensitive to environmental conditions - and the scripts and languages they were written in became outdated or even lost.

And yet we can restore and preserve those books today, and experts can still read them. And occasionally, even a language that was lost completely is recovered - or a scroll that was burned in the eruption of Vesuvius: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-have-de...