The kid seems to have been regarded as a medium of exchange, at all events rent was paid by means of kids, or sometimes sheep, while the goat often served as a sacrificial victim as we have seen elsewhere.[174] The kids belonging to the goddess Bau were tended by the women of the harem, though also sometimes by herdsmen. Goats as well as sheep were held in high value for their wool, two species being particularly singled out, one being known as the white-fleeced goat and the other as the black-fleeced. Other animals of a nondescript character also played an important part in the life of the people as well as in the service of the gods. Birds too formed part of the offerings due to the powers above, the principal of which were apparently the goose, the duck, the chicken and the turtle dove. The fertility of the soil naturally encouraged its cultivation even in the earliest times. Part of the land in the time of Urukagina belonged to the royal domains, the remainder being occupied by private individuals. Cereals, such as corn and barley, were cultivated with success, as in the days of Herodotus,[175] while some of the land was reserved for fruit trees and vegetable products. But the land was not entirely divided up into crown-lands and landed estates, “small ownership” accounted for a certain amount of the available ground, and it would appear that even poor women sometimes had their little plots; the small owners were often however the victims of the extortionate capitalist, and their wrongs from time to time called for redress. On such occasions the official entrusted with the task of readjusting matters took great care to distinguish between arable-land and land which did not admit of being cultivated. The supervision of the royal estates involved, as might be expected, the employment of a whole army of agricultural officials with different degrees of responsibility and varying duties to perform. Agriculture in the time of Urukagina even as to-day entailed a regular series of operations: the land had to be ploughed, the seed sown, and the harvest reaped, and last, but perhaps the most important and the most laborious of all, there was the work of irrigation, which in a land subject to floods in winter and a rainless semi-tropical heat in summer required constant attention and an infinite amount of hard work. The cutting of canals, even in our own day, with all the appliances at the disposal of modern hydraulic science, is by no means an easy or quickly accomplished task, and we can readily understand that the labour was no less, and the process no simpler some four or five thousand years ago. The work of irrigation, so essential and so arduous, was not left to individual enterprise, but was undertaken by the state and formed one of the principal departments of public works, and the early rulers of Lagash seem to have been as proud of their irrigation-engineering performances as they were of their triumphs on the battle-field.