In 1324, Mansa Musa, ruler of the Mali Empire, crossed the Sahara on pilgrimage to Mecca with a huge retinue and vast amounts of gold. While passing through Cairo, he gave away and spent so much of it that the precious metal lost value. According to the chronicler al-Umari, who stayed in Cairo about twelve years later, the price of gold still hadn't recovered. The 1375 Catalan Atlas shows him holding a gold nugget.
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.