When writing we assume a lot on readers understanding. We don't have to explain mundane things when everybody knows them by name. We might just need to add some qualities to them.to make them more personal. But we assume that knowledge is at same level as ours.
This can often lead the reader astray when reading something out of their time. Those things might have changed since they were written. When the distance in time grows greater so does the disparity in understanding. We might even start to replace modern interprerstions of old things to make things confusing.
When trying to derive details from those old writings it's hard to get into the details. Simple things the writer thought were obvious at the time might puzzle us now thousands of years later as we have never seen anything but a modern interpretation of the thing and need to fill those gaps with those. But what if they are wrong?
Pictures however don't leave such details untold. They tell us exactly how the thing looked back then and we are very likely to construct an accurate replica of the thing. But the picture might not tell what the thing is for. How and for what was it used?