Between 1405 and 1433, Admiral Zheng He led seven voyages of the Ming fleet, with dozens of ships and thousands of sailors, as far as Arabia and the coast of East Africa. In 1414, a giraffe from the Malindi region, in present-day Kenya, was presented to the Yongle Emperor via a sultan of Bengal. The court hailed it as a qilin, a mythical creature of good omen, and had it painted. After 1433, China abandoned these great voyages.
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.