Specialists agree on at least three independent inventions of writing: Mesopotamia around 3300 BCE, China around 1200 BCE and Mesoamerica in the first millennium BCE. Egyptian hieroglyphs, which appeared almost at the same time as cuneiform, may be a fourth. An idea so powerful that humanity came up with it more than once.
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.