Many other improvements contributed to this tremendous development of wet rice growing. Transplanting rice, previously sown and raised in small nurseries, shortened the time needed in the rice fields and made it easier to increase the number of annual harvests. The use of animal and later motorized traction to plow, mix, and level the soil before transplanting made it possible to save precious time. Lastly, selection of non-photoperiodic varieties (not as sensitive to the relative length of day and night and thus cultivable in all seasons in various parts of the world) and of varieties with a short reproductive cycle made it possible to achieve more than three rice harvests per year.
From natural lakes to huge installations in valleys and deltas, a whole range of hydraulic systems were created, combining in diverse ways rice paddies, terraces, dikes, locks, diversion dams, reservoir dams, irrigation canals, and draining canals. The architecture of the large hydraulic works of the rice-growing regions was different from that found in the large valleys of the arid regions. But the works were of comparable scale and gave rise to comparable forms of social and political organization.
Notice, however, that the great aquatic rice-growing civilizations of monsoon Asia began to develop more than two millennia after the hydro-agricultural civilizations of the Indus, Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile Valleys. In China, the very first hydraulic city-states appeared in the second millennium B.C.E., in the middle Yellow River region situated close to the Chinese center of origin. These cities were united into the first embryonic empire under the Shang Dynasty (seventeenth to eleventh centuries B.C.E.). However, historians speak of a true wet rice-growing civilization beginning only in the following period (eleventh to third centuries B.C.E.), during which ten hydraulic and wall-building kingdoms were formed and fought one another until the most powerful among them, the Qing (from 249 to 246 B.C.E.) imposed its supremacy and administration to all of China, from the Great Wall to Canton.
In India, while rice was cultivated in the east since at least 2000 B.C.E., the first hydro-agricultural civilization of the middle Ganges Valley did not appear until around 800 B.C.E. The emergence of this civilization followed the Aryan penetration which had begun several centuries earlier, around 1500 B.C.E. Coming from the north of Iran where their herds exploited the steppes, which were relatively unproductive and not very propitious for cultivation, tribes of Aryan herders had previously invaded the Indus Valley where they had, it is thought, precipitated the collapse of the preexisting large hydraulic cities (Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa). Then, traversing the Punjab, they colonized in successive waves the quasi-intact great forests of the Ganges Valley and north-west India, still occupied by communities of hunters and fishers who occasionally practiced a temporary form of slash-and-burn agriculture. As a result, the immigrants were compelled to abandon pastoral nomadism, become settled, adopt the cultural complex of the humid tropical forest (including Oryza sativa) and, over several centuries, extend their clearings before reaching the end of the arboreal ecosystem. After that, the first post-forest agrarian systems and first hydraulic city-kingdoms of the Ganges Valley were formed. In the sixth century B.C.E., one of these kingdoms (the Moghada) began to subjugate and unify its neighbors forming, in the fourth century B.C.E., an empire that occupied at first the whole Ganges Valley and which, two centuries later, extended from the Indus to the Gulf of Bengal, and from the Himalayas three-quarters of the way down the Deccan peninsula.
During the first millennium C.E., a whole series of other hydraulic and rice-growing city-states were formed, either autonomously or by expansion, in the Indochinese peninsula, Japan, Indonesia, and even Madagascar. If China exerted a technological and commercial influence over most of these civilizations, India often provided them with certain cultural elements (writing, religion, art, government, and administration).
~~A History of World Agriculture -by- Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart
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