Courtier and poet Sir John Harington designed a toilet in 1596 with a cistern and a valve that flushed waste away with water. He installed one at his home near Bath and reportedly had another fitted for his godmother, Queen Elizabeth I, at Richmond Palace. He described it in a book with a joke title, The Metamorphosis of Ajax, a pun on 'jakes', slang for a privy. The decisive patent only came in 1775.
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.