The author of Early China: A Social and Cultural History occasionally engages in asides which analogize his own domain of study to other societies and histories. In the process, he illustrates how China is in some ways nonpareil.
When discussing the emergence of philosophical thinking during the Spring and Autumn Period there is a connection made to the same process occurring in India and Greece. It is suggested that during this period the memories of the older Bronze Age world were fading, and in the chaos, new ideas and strictures were arising. The problem is that in fact there is no analogy between the Chinese recollection of their own past, and that of India and Greece.
Homer and Hesiod both lived in the period after the Greek Dark Ages, which lasted from about 1100 to 800 BC. Though the oral history did preserve important fragments of knowledge from the Mycenaean period (e.g., the importance of the Argolid and the distinctive boar’s head helmets), enough was forgotten that the Greeks were not entirely clear that the citadels constructed during the Mycenaean period were in fact constructions of their ancestors. The loss of literacy meant there was no institutional connection to the past, and when Linear B was deciphered most archaeologists were surprised that it was an archaic form of Greek.
For India, the connections are even more tenuous and vague. The Mycenaeans seem to have created a synthetic civilization, repurposing Minoan high culture toward their own ends. But, they were also clearly Greek, with many of their gods being the same gods that we recognize from the Classical era. In Early China the author implies that the people of 6th century India may have had some memory of the Indus Valley Civilization. Though it is likely some elements of culture were passed down from that period, no institutional memory seems to have persisted, in large part because of the likely cultural shock of the arrival of Indo-Aryans around 1500 BC.
The contrast with China here is strong. In Early China the author talks about the Doubting Antiquity School, which was skeptical of the veracity of Chinese historical memory before the Qin period 2,300 years ago. Today, due to archaeology, analysis of inscriptions on bronze vessels, as well as the famous oracle bones, it is clear that historians such as Sima Qian had access to cultural memory that went back at least 1,000 years. The Shang dynasty, once thought to be legend, clearly existed. Names of kings retrieved from the oracle bones matche those provided by classical sources, including their sequence of reigns.
We know that in 1046 the Zhou defeated the Shang. Because of a planetary alignment anomaly the month and date are even remembered.
Which brings us to the Erlitou culture. This archaeological culture flourished in broadly the same region as the Shang dynasty polity, but earlier. The author of Early China contends that this was likely the Xia dynasty. Though we will never be able to validate this in all likelihood, as there are no known forms of writing from this society, we can assume just as with the Shang the legends of the Xia probably have some basis in fact (eventually ancient DNA will accept or reject demographic continuity).
When I was eight years old I memorized all the capitals in the world…because (well, because a friend had done the same). I’ve always been into geography. But there is one thing I’ve been guilty about for nearly twenty years: I can’t point to all the provinces of China on a map and name them. For example, I only scored 83% in 2 minutes 10 seconds on 
