In 1872, at the British Museum, Assyriologist George Smith deciphered a tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh: a man warned by a god builds a boat, saves his family and animals, then releases birds to find dry land. Mesopotamian flood stories were circulating by the early 2nd millennium BCE, well before Genesis was written.
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.