Barley

Barley is a cereal grass, Hordeum vulgare, cultivated since deep antiquity as a bread grain, animal fodder and, historically, an in-kind currency across the ancient Near East. Genetic evidence points to the Israel-Jordan area of the southern Fertile Crescent as the primary site of its domestication from the wild grass Hordeum spontaneum, with securely dated domesticated remains at Tell Abu Hureyra by 7500 BCE and Tell Aswad by 6900 BCE. In Babylonia, Assyria and the lands of the Hittites, barley was the principal grain of everyday food, valued in part for tolerating salty, marginal land better than wheat, and it also served as a standardized unit of payment and of weight.