Given a basis for a vector space, we can define linear functions on the vector space simply by picking any image for each basis element.
That's all these equations are: specifying the values of linear functionals on the elements of the basis.
We could instead give a pointwise definition of these functionals
$$ \phi_i\left( \sum_j c_{ij} v_j \right) = c_{ii} $$
but that's more complicated and has a lot of unnecessary redundancy.
In coordinates, it's just as trivial; the coordinate form of the basis vector $v_j$ is just the standard $n \times 1$ basis column vector $\hat{e}_j$. The coordinate form of covectors in the dual space are $1 \times n$ row vectors, with $\phi_i$ corresponding to the standard basis row vector $\hat{e}_i^T$.
The equations are just computing the products $\hat{e}_i^T \hat{e}_j$, and give a coordinate-free way to express the relationship between the two bases.