When the crowd stormed the Bastille, it freed only seven inmates: four forgers, two men deemed insane and a count locked up at his own family's request. Its most famous resident, the Marquis de Sade, was already gone: he had been moved to Charenton about ten days earlier, after shouting to passers-by from his window. What the insurgents really wanted was the gunpowder stored in the fortress.
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.