In 132, the scholar Zhang Heng presented the Han court with a large bronze vessel decorated with eight dragons, each holding a ball. When the ground shook, a ball dropped into a toad's mouth, showing the quake's direction. According to the chronicles, it once flagged a distant earthquake that nobody in the capital had felt.
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.