ABSTRACT
The Indus valley had harbored the great “hydraulic” civilization of Harappa between the third and second millenia BC. This civilization would develop to have exchanges with the Mesopotamian millenia, and had extended its influence along the “lapis-lazuli route”, to the north of the Hindu Kush mountains in Bactria (Figures 1.3, 7.1). After the collapse of this civilization only the trading posts to the south remained, at and around the mouth of the Indus at Lothal. Development later continues in the Bactria – a prosperous civilization grows on the banks of the Oxus and its tributaries, a civilization that uses gravity canal irrigation in the cultivation of terraces overlooking the rivers (Figure 7.2).
