In September 1519, five ships and more than 230 men left Spain under Ferdinand Magellan. He never came back: he was killed in April 1521 in the Philippines, at the Battle of Mactan. It was the Basque navigator Juan Sebastián Elcano who brought the lone surviving ship, the Victoria, home in September 1522 with 18 survivors. The first circumnavigation bears the name of a man who only made part of it.
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.