Why were ancient cultures so obsessed with lineage?

Pretty much any text you read from anciet times, be it Greek, Egyptian, Christian, Chinese, Latin...Always they have pages and pages dedicated to lineage and who was born from who. And they are obsessed with saying "character, son of x". Why? What is the obsession? Did people back then really refer to each other as "son of X" all the time?

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Ever tried the redpill? We're more conscious about our white past, heritage, and tradition than ever. Don't ever forget the whiteness of your ancestors

Well first of all, the ancient world understood "nationality" in terms of descent and lineage. It's in the Bible, it's in both Greek and Roman history, it's in many other things. Modern semites are just descendants of Shem, son of Noah; his other son Ham, who went to Africa, is the reason for the naming of the "Hamitic" languages. Common lineage was how people understood the world in lieu of explicit racial categories, and no concept of a modern state or nation.

Early polities especially would have been beholden to a strong family (say, the descendant of a founding dictator, or a nobleman who originally led this group of people to found a colony there), or set of families in stable aristocratic tension. In Homer, you read constantly about "guest-friendship," which was a major aspect of their culture. Because there were no states or polities outside of the personal domains of nobles, strongmen, and tyrants, and the cities they tenuously controlled, you secured safe travel by knowing a guy who knows a guy in the city or country you want to visit, and he does you that favour because your great grandpa did the same for his great grandmother when she was exiled. And maybe while you're there, you take a wife, and end up founding a new branch of the family. And around each prominent person would be a network of relatively less prominent people, clients, who came to him for favours and returned favours when he asked. This would be seen as being a client of the such-and-such family, which was itself a position that could last generations in your family and lead to very close ties.

Guest-friendship was maybe the central social institution of many of these civilisations, including when it became prominent again in early feudalism in medieval Europe, suggesting that it's a natural human tendency and way of making sense of the world. It was mediated by gift-giving, oaths of honour, bonds of friendship and loyalty, etc.

Obviously such connections become semi-legendary after a few generations of being maintained only by the collective oral memory of each family. Obviously families are going to claim descent from prestigious ancestors, and if those prestigious figures (say, the founding tyrant) themselves claimed divine descent, bam, on top of being a prestigious and ancient family whom everyone knows and respects (and fears), you can now claim to be the founders of your town, and even to be related to the ancient heroes and gods.

I have literally been wondering the exact same thing all day, thats spooky as shit my man, spooky as a goddamn shit

I think Herodotus talks somewhere about how all the places he visited, and asked about their origins and what makes them special, would tell mutually conflicting stories and lay claim to mutually exclusive or strangely overlapping histories. Like, five different islands claimed to be where such-and-such god or hero finally settled down. That's because this process endlessly compounds on itself and becomes institutionalized. Research into various oral societies by Albert Lord and Walter Ong also showed that ancient peoples lived in a "perpetual present" with no real sense of linear history. The past was conceived as a flat backdrop of important and legendary fixtures, and people in the present were concerned to link themselves and their cities to those fixtures, not so much concerned to do what we would consider scientific historical work to trace their developments over time. Most of these places had things like city records, but these were imperfect and often lost or burned down in frequent conflicts, and many of the best records would come from powerful families anyway, for example by filling their houses with the statues or death-masks of great members of the family.

It was simply their way of making sense of the world. Look at how medieval Italian cities behaved, and how the post-Carolingian degeneration into castellanies behaved. In times of uncertainty and chaos Italian cities formed powerful families, as people clove to the only people they could trust, and those families fortified themselves into castles-within-cities and dominated the cities for generations with their personal back-and-forth politics. Similar things happened in both post-Roman and post-Carolingian Western Europe. In times of uncertainty, powerful figures trust their families, and then bind retainers to them by oaths of friendship, loyalty, honour, and reciprocal obligation.

When you no longer know who the king is in Paris, or what it really MEANS that he claims to be loyal to such-and-such emperor, you at least know one thing: the Vxixgizx family has retained your family for five generations, and your great grandfather swore an oath to protect them, and his daughter's life was saved from evil robbers by Lord Vxixgizx the 5th (and actually this is misremembered, and much more complicated, but that's what YOU think happened), etc. People live in a perpetual present - what you really WANT is to renew and re-seal your sense of who you can trust, and who you should be loyal to, so you look to the past for threads to weave together and create a justification.

Lineages are certainly given but the obsession is not with lineages per se but with legitimacy.

The biological imperative of every every organism is to pass on its genes. We're obsessed with the process that's supposed to pass on those genes (sex), but they understood that sex was just a means to the end of making sure your genes survive.

Because that was how society worked? You weren't an individual, you were part of a family or other power.

With technology, changes in politics and the works of philosophers, our societies eventually grew to become individualistic.

There came capitalism, and all of a sudden you could own something other than a name and its holdings. You could be your own person.

Whether or not that's a good thing, now that's another question.

...

A lot of ancient texts are actually the heritage of the ruling party and a good chunk of the text is establishing the connection between the gods or God and previous rulers to the regime of the day.