The Economics of Barley

Liverani goes into great detail about how barley was the only practical element from which to build an economy the people of Uruk were capable of creating. Most importantly barley is a grain cereal, which he explains, can be preserved relatively long compared to other crops such as fruit and tubers. This is very important because if a central organization, is this case the temple, is going to collect and redistribute a food source, the food must stay fresh long enough to be redistributed. Liverani goes on to explain that though it was the least nutritious of the possible cereal grains the people of ancient Mesopotamia could grow barley the quickest, most resilient, and most efficiently which consequently all proved to be more important than nutritional content. As the rivers flooded annually it was important to have a quick harvest season, and because the over flowing of the rivers left a lot of salt in the soil, it was important that barley was very resistant.
The economic system that developed out of barley required the temple to take on a lot of delegation, in order to make sure it could provide all of its dependants with barley. The temple owned and controlled the land on which barley was grown, and would then both sharecrop the land, and during months that required additional labor in order to harvest enough barley for a significant surplus, the temple would require families and towns to send workers to help farm the land. The temple would have to pay these extra laborers with a share of the crop, and when also counting the share of the crop that went towards reseeding and feeding the livestock, the temple could hope to retain two thirds of the barley as surplus to be redistributed.
While later Liverani begins to discuss how sheep and their wool became another staple of this early economy, I think it is clear that the cultivation of barley by the temple for its dependants laid the foundations for an economy that would become much larger than this one of a single product.