A lot of thought went into protected harbor tech way back when, for the simple reason that protected harbors attract silt and sand until they fill up. I believe it was one of the ancient Greek harbors that innovated a design so the harbor would automatically wash out its silt and sand.
The technique to do so would be gold, so I would think it would travel, and I wonder if India had something like this.
I’ve been closing in on finishing the Roman Empire/Indian Ocean book, finally, and the ports of India tended to be shifting silty estuaries and such. A surviving Roman account refers to what we might call dugout canoes which were used to load and unload large vessels. Also the ports frequented by the Romans changed over time due to local politics, conquests, shifts of control, and piracy. Those were all more important than the physical harbors, which is interesting.