Under the Achaemenid kings, a royal road of about 2,500 km linked Sardis, near the Aegean, to Susa in Iran. According to Herodotus, a traveler needed about three months to cover it, but the king's orders moved far faster: riders passed them from station to station, each covering one day's journey. Herodotus praised couriers stopped by neither snow nor rain, words now carved on the facade of a major New York post office.
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.