According to Herodotus, writing a few decades after the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE, the messenger Pheidippides ran from Athens to Sparta, roughly 240 km, to ask for reinforcements, arriving the day after he set out. The tale of a runner announcing victory in Athens and then collapsing only appears centuries later, in Plutarch and Lucian. Yet that legend is what inspired the marathon at the 1896 Olympic Games.
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.