A Harappan city in a desert survived on one of the ancient world's most advanced water systems.
Dholavira (c. 3000–1500 BCE) had a network of reservoirs, dams and channels capturing seasonal runoff, plus sophisticated drainage.
— Dholavira, Indus civilisation (c. 3000–1500 BCE)
Urban water management, rainwater harvesting and sanitation engineering.
A genuine, defensible parallel.
Dholavira, in arid Kutch, has no perennial river — so its builders engineered survival: a cascade of large stone-lined reservoirs (occupying much of the city), check-dams on seasonal streams to divert floodwater, and careful storm-water drainage. The wider Indus civilisation is famous for covered drains, standardised baked bricks, and the Great Bath — urban sanitation unmatched for its time.
This is solid archaeology. The honest note is simply that it's Bronze-Age Indus engineering (pre-Vedic in the usual reckoning), and much about the civilisation remains unread (the script is undeciphered). As planned, water-resilient urbanism 5,000 years ago, it's genuinely remarkable.