Around the year 100, in the north of Roman Britain, Claudia Severa invited her friend Sulpicia Lepidina to her birthday party on 11 September. The letter, written in ink on a thin wooden tablet, survived in the waterlogged soil of Vindolanda fort, near the future Hadrian's Wall. A scribe wrote most of it, but Claudia added a few lines in her own hand: probably the earliest known Latin writing by a woman.
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.