Setting out from Tangier in 1325 on the pilgrimage to Mecca, the Moroccan Ibn Battuta only came home for good around 1354, after almost thirty years on the road. North and East Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, India, the Maldives, then China by his own account, and finally the Mali Empire: about 120,000 km in all, far more than Marco Polo. His memories, dictated to the scholar Ibn Juzayy, became the Rihla, one of the great medieval travel books.
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.