In the 12th century BCE, in the 29th year of Ramesses III's reign, the craftsmen of Deir el-Medina, who dug and decorated the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings, put down their tools: their grain rations had stopped arriving. They walked off the job and sat behind the mortuary temples, shouting 'We are hungry!'. The scribe Amennakht recorded the episode on a papyrus now held in Turin's Egyptian Museum. It is the oldest documented strike.
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.