The story of Barley
Barley is one of the first crops people ever domesticated. The earliest evidence of domesticated barley comes from the Fertile Crescent, with fully domesticated types found at sites such as Jarmo in modern Iraq, dated to roughly 9,000 to 7,000 BCE. Genetic studies also point to Tibet as an additional centre of barley domestication, and barley landraces of the Himalayas and India carry distinct genes of their own.
In Sanskrit, barley is yava, and it appears in the oldest Indian texts. The word is not always precise. In the Rigveda, yava seems to mean grain in general, but later texts use it clearly for barley, and scholars regard it as very probable that barley was already cultivated in the Rigvedic period. Barley also turns up in the Ayurvedic text Charaka Samhita, and in ritual, where yava is still offered in many Hindu ceremonies.
Barley does the quiet work.
In the Himalaya, barley never went away. In Ladakh it is described as the major crop and the lifeline of the people. Roasted and ground, it becomes tsampa, the staple of Ladakh and Tibet, eaten as a dough with butter tea. Across the plains of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, roasted barley (often with chana) is sattu, the flour for sattu paratha, litti, and the summer cooler sattu sharbat.
In our blends barley is a quiet helper. It is mild, it has some gluten, and it brings a lot of fibre, so it fits easily into a wheat-based roti: 15 percent of it is in First Light.
