In 79 CE, the eruption of Vesuvius carbonized hundreds of papyrus scrolls in a luxurious villa at Herculaneum, leaving them impossible to unroll without crumbling. In 2024, three students won the Vesuvius Challenge by deciphering more than 2,000 Greek characters inside one of them, using X-ray scans and artificial intelligence trained to detect the ink. The text, probably by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus, discusses pleasure.
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.