We also know that needy individuals, taken into such temple institutions, were supplied with regular rations and put to work on the temple’s lands and in its workshops. The very first factories – or, at least, the very first we are aware of in history – were charitable institutions of this kind, where temple bureaucrats would supply women with wool to spin and weave, supervise the disposal of the product (much of it traded with upland groups in exchange for wood, stone and metal, unavailable in the river valleys), and provide them with carefully apportioned rations.
