The working landscape that the tank system exists to produce: bunded fields, a village tank above them, and a cascade carrying water from one village to the next down a shallow valley.
The unit that matters here is not the great royal reservoir but the small village tank, of which there were tens of thousands. They were built and maintained locally, governed by customary water-sharing rules, and it is this dense network rather than the monumental works that sustained settlement across the dry zone for two thousand years.1