On April 9, 1860, Parisian inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville traced the vibrations of a voice singing 'Au clair de la lune' onto soot-blackened paper. His phonautograph could record sound but not play it back, which was never its purpose. The recording predates Edison's phonograph by seventeen years. Yet it took until 2008 for American researchers to digitize the tracings and finally make them audible.
Around 2300 BCE, Enheduanna, daughter of King Sargon of Akkad, became high priestess of the Moon god at Ur. She composed hymns to the goddess Inanna and put her name to them. She is the oldest person identified as the author of a literary work, about 1,500 years before Homer.
Squeeze Earth's 4.5 billion years into a single 24-hour day. Homo sapiens shows up around 11:59:54 p.m., roughly six seconds before midnight. All of written history, from Sumerian tablets to today, fits into the final tenth of a second. A cosmic blink.