In the 7th century BCE, the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal gathered thousands of clay tablets at Nineveh: omens, medicine, epics. In 612 BCE the city was sacked and burned. But the fire baked the clay and made it more durable. Some 30,000 tablets and fragments are now held at the British Museum.
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.