Although the amounts of rations were not equal, nor the tasks assigned to all men equally burdensome, we observe here a fact unparalleled in the ancient world, namely, that in principle all members of the community were equal. All received rations as well as allotments to support themselves; all worked on the Common and on the canals and dikes. There was no leisure class. Likewise there were no native serfs. Some foreigners and prisoners of war were kept as slaves, but private people possessed very few, if any. Slaves worked in the temple alongside free-men as porters and gardeners. Slave girls were kept in considerable numbers as spinners, and they helped in the kitchens, the brewery, and the sties where pigs were fattened. The allotments differed in size, even when assigned to men of the same profession, and we cannot explain the differences. There is no evidence of large estates in the hands of single members of the temple community, but we may suppose that the existence of several temple communities in one city may have made it possible for some men to dispose of allotments in more than one of them. We know of a _nubanda_ who had about 120 acres and a supervisor of the herb magazines who owned about 80 acres.[103] But such conditions represent deviations from the original system. More significant is the fact that even the smallest allotment entered in the temple lists—a _gan_, or seven-eighths of an acre—would suffice to keep a man. Monogamy and the scarcity of slaves would, in any case, limit the area which one family could cultivate. Women are also listed as holders of allotments, and this means that they served the community in some function or other. For the basic rule of the temple community was that a person received land for his sustenance because he put his specialized skill at the service of all: the shepherd and the fisherman, the carpenter and the smith provided the temple magazines with certain quantities of their produce or simply devoted all their time to work on temple property. The magazines (Fig. 19)[104] contained an immense variety of articles: grain, sesame seed as the raw material for oil, onions and other vegetables, beer, dates, wine (which was rare), fish (dried or salted), fat, wool, skins, huge quantities of reeds and rushes used for ceilings and for torches, temporary structures, mats for floor coverings and hangings, wood of many kinds, asphalt (used wherever anything had to be waterproof), valuable stones like marble and diorite, to be made into statues and cult objects such as offering-stands, ritual vessels, and the maceheads of the temple guards. The stone, and some of the wood, was imported by merchants, who also brought from Elam aromatics which, in the “oil house,” were made into ointments with a base of animal fat. Tools were owned by the temple in great quantities and given out on loan.