>> christianity made greco-roman culture relatable to most of the west.

I find this statement confusing. Hellenistic culture was the West. All Western culture since, including Rome, has imitated it. Christianity didn't make Greco-Roman culture accessible to the West. It made monotheistic, Hebrew/Judean culture accessible to Rome (primarily by making it less harsh and less monotheistic), and then spread onward to the Germanic tribes, Celts, Slavs, Dacians, and others who came into Rome's former orbit.

Artifacts themselves can be just as misleading as written history, there's an enormous selection bias. The idea that archeology is more trustworthy than history is really mistaken, the two work best in tandem.

> I still think there is something we can call “Western Civilization"

This is perhaps the least controversial statement in history. It's obviously true. Western Civilization is:

1) Greece

2) Rome, borrowing from the Greeks

3) Christianity taking over Rome

4) Germanic tribes adopting Roman law + the Christian religion

5) Protestantism

6) The Renaissance

7) The Enlightenment

You can read Plato, and it all makes sense to you, but a lot of contemporaneous Asian sources would be quite alien. Its a weird kind of ethnocentrism to deny such a thing exists, because it leads to thinking that western civilization is in fact universal.

Like it or not, the "west" has a cultural common ground (Indo-European derived, chiefly greco-roman, gaulic and germanic cultures which were not isolated from each other as you would imply), and more importantly a religious common ground in judeo-christian religion and morality. Poland helped Austria against the Ottoman invasions because of this common ground, and predominantly anglo-saxon Americans read Homer's poetry because of this common ground.

From the viewpoint of a person outside "the west" under both grounds, it's a clearly recognized entity. There may be blurred contours. That doesn't invalidate the existence of such an entity.

> There is this anguish to define the "West" as a real entity, while it's not.

The West is the Latin Church. From the Latin Church came the Protestants. From that West meant and means anything influenced by or in protest of the Latin Church in Europe and its colonies. Very easy to understand, makes less of a difference today than it might have 100 years ago but to pretend it's hard to define or not a real thing isn't serious.

There's also an incredibly powerful urge to take our worldview and overlay it on the past - for example, assuming that Westphalian states are how the world has always operated.

as a ~~south asian~~ (stupid label) Indian, some knee-jerk reaction is justified because people tend to believe in exaggerated time scales (for instance, based on projected dates of astronomical events in the Hindu Epics, which predates the bronze age and the war chariot), whereas the westerners don't have a religious attachment and speak a realistic timeline for Homeric epics.

If we are speaking of the classical times: yes, India was on-par with the greco-roman and chinese world; left a cultural imprint on east and south-east asia and traded with the western world too. But the rise of pacifist religions, being in a nice position to be attacked from central asia, and internal strifes basically rendered it useless in the last millenium. Huge population, uncontrolled urbanization and a corrupt education system is the bane of this century. If we don't solve that, no amount of classical civilization is going to help. Germanic people were considered primitive by the greeks and romans, now look where they are!

I can say as an American I've never really had that impression. My impression of all ancient societies including Greeks and Romans but of course Egyptians, Chinese, Persians, Indian cultures, etc there have been periods of rise and periods of fall.

Americans are most acquainted with the Romans and our system of government was designed to take the best aspects of their republic and to prevent the conditions that led to Roman imperialism. The fall of Rome is ingrained in our culture as something to be wary of, that all great civilizations fall prey to.

But it is generally understood that other parts of the world were more advanced at different times or advanced in certain technology beyond their peers at the time.

Marco Polo trade routes to China and through the silk road were popular because of the goods and products europeans couldn't make or cultivate. Even Christopher Columbus was attempting to sail to India as a more efficient trade route and that is why the natives were called Indians.

The ancient temples in India are impressive and certainly many grand civilizations rose and fell on the subcontinent. We are just less familiar with those stories as their origins didn't shape our own as directly.

> from the Western world

You might be overgeneralising just a little bit here as outside the US and the UK, I think few people in the Western world care about the accent of Indians when they speak English, and are not exposed to their call centers anyway.

I think most people are somewhat aware of the civilisations that occurred there.