Hello. Not discouraging anyone from providing additional information, but do check out these older answers. They might be helpful :

Did the Romans know that the Great Pyramid of Giza was 2500 year old? by u/toldinstone

Ancient Egypt is often described as the longest continuous human civilization, and seems to have maintained a surprising amount of cultural continuity. How accurate is this description? If so why were they able to maintain continuity so much more than other civilizations by u/Bentresh

I think what you may be conflating some modern ideas of things like anarchy and history with the reality of ancient people and their experiences. You have to remember that people really haven't changed dramatically in the course of written history. So, the opinions ancient people had about their own history wouldn't be that different from most modern people. That is to say, people were confident they understood their history and could trace their people through their own oral traditions. So, they wouldn't necessarily see themselves as living in some kind of new condition, but continuing the traditions of their forefathers.

I think you are also exploring the line between history and mythology which is a modern distinction. We certainly now see many myths as a fictionalization of either moral lessons or historical events, but that is not always how ancient people would perceive it. They would track history as being founded by some divine event, and be able to track history directly back from that event. Consider the genealogy lists present in the old testament. This allowed ancient jews to remember the beginning of man, and trace their ancestry, or at least their tribes ancestry, back to that event. Similar lists of things like kings or chiefs trace back cities to their foundation by gods in Mesopotamia or similarly the myths of Romulus and Remus at the founding of Rome. So, ancient people would see themselves partially in contrast to mythical chaos that existed before the gods formed the world, but that wouldn't be that different from how a modern reader might consider the story of genesis or similar tales.

Also, consider that though we might discount oral traditions in the study of history, or at least it has been discounted greatly in the past study of history. We know through archeology, geology and other disciplines that the aboriginal people of Australi were able to describe details and changes about Australia that date back almost 10,000 years. This brings up the interesting notion that ancient people had as much or more history than we even do now. If our history extends only to the written record starting about 5000 years ago, and oral tradition is able to preserve details for over twice as long than there is a case to be made that those ancient people had more history available to them about their own societies than we do now. Granted, these oral traditions contain lessons about how cultural traditions and habits formed. Meaning that ancient people had an understanding that there were stretches of time where different habits or methods were followed, and they now knew better. Still, they wouldn't necessarily perceive those times as anarchical or empty of civilisation unless their own stories explicitly told them it was so.

I do seem to recall from African myth where their ancestors didn't have joints in their limbs and didn't use tools or make buildings. Then the gods changed them to be what we would now resemble humans. I think this is the closest I can recall to an idea of a previous time of human life that featured no society so to speak, but these mythologized humans were also barely human...

preface: I'm an antiquities collector with academic background in science, not a history, though I learnt a great deal about the people behind the artefacts

The distinction between civilisation and pre-civilisation is one of arbitrary nature and reflects a division between written history opposed to oral or material. That is the emergence of writing is how we decide when civilisation begins (with the peculiar exception of the Incas), as writing is understood to be preceded by emergence of a complex urban societies where need for recordkeeping necessited it's development. Whetever the appearence of writing itself was recognised is an interesting question I can't get into, but what I can tell you is the simple fact no civilisation appeared ex nihilio but was preceded by increasingly advanced cultures, which term is used by archeologists to express commonality observed among material findings, from which one may derive the existence of a distinct group.

All major civilisations have (neolithic or chalcolithic) cultures that are understood to have grown out from. This chart is a decent overview of the Neolithic in this regard. One example that is close to me are the Etruscans. The earliest group that can be identified as one ges back to 900BCE and we call it the Villanovan culture until Greeks start to mention them in the 8-7th century BCE. Before that there was the Proto-Villanovan culture stretching back to the 12th century BCE. Perhaps more relevant is Ancient Egypt - here the very last phase of the Neolithic Naqada typology, Naqada III is same as what others call protodynastic period, and is when upper and lower Egypt was unified, when hieroglyphs emerge and so on. And said III. gradually emerged from the II. (Gerzeh) and I. phase (Amratian), which latter began at around 4400BCE, essentially 1200 years of Egyptian history we have no written records of until the ultimate years.

That said it's important to recognize that besides these latest phases these connections are not necessary one of linear lineage owing to the often thousands of years and many identified phases some of these cultures went through, so a simple "A existed before B in X place therefor A is ancestor B" statement can never be made until proven by additional research.

What I'm getting it and what I directly observe in artefacts is that save from going to "higher" to "lesser" order (ie collapse) there was no sudden shift in lifes of most people, it's all very gradual. Even writing itself didn't just appear overnight. In Sumer for example we have examples of early cuneiform (mostly accounting tokens) from the Uruk period that are still very pictorial-like. Fortified settlements dotted the Near East thousands of years before their names begun to be recorded. People in Neolithic Greece made pottery like this two-three thousand years before Linear B. Or consider that the unifier of Egypt, Narmer did not just make up titles united two that already existed by then.

As such the premise that they should remember some kind of anarchy is faulty because they were not preceded by anarchy, but by materially fairly complex cultures with a way of life very similar to theirs. They weren't just a few generations away from the time with no (large) settlements, little to no societal organisation, no codified laws, but hundreds if not thousands of years away, which does not exclude oral history remembering it, but to these people, they very much had a history.