To irrigate the desert, the Persians invented the qanat: a gently sloping underground tunnel that carries water from an aquifer to the fields by gravity alone, without evaporation. Some stretch for tens of kilometers and still work today. UNESCO added the Persian qanats to its World Heritage list in 2016.
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.