Around 500 BCE, the Persian king Darius I completed a canal linking the Nile to the Red Sea, begun, according to Herodotus, by Pharaoh Necho II. Stone stelae commemorate the work. Restored by the Ptolemies and then the Romans, it let ships pass from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea more than 2,000 years before the Suez Canal opened in 1869.
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.