Chapter 7 investigates the ways that historical knowledge served as the blueprint for Zhou state-building enterprise. I hope to address two central questions: What were the study of the sources of historical knowledge for the architects of the Zhou state? What did the Zhou leaders do with the diverse legacy of the past? A comparative study of archaeology and historiography reveals that the social memory from the Longshan and Erlitou society was not erased under the Shang hegemony based in Henei, and that pre-Shang legacies were shared and transmitted among memory communities present in the honeycomb of Shang social structure, which established a frame of knowledge in which many polities and lineages with different political stakes laid claims to their ancestral landscape as memory communities. Historical knowledge from diverse sources allowed Zhou leaders to imagine their world through major landmarks and historical spaces. It also presented Zhou state founders with the opportunity to craft their vision of a historical civilization around the Sandai framework, which provided the basis for the notion of the Mandate of Heaven in Zhou political philosophy.