Tetradrachm

The Minaean Kingdom — centered on the ancient city of Qarnaw in what is now northern Yemen — was a mercantile power whose wealth derived almost entirely from controlling overland incense and spice routes connecting southern Arabia to the Mediterranean. These tetradrachms were almost certainly struck as trade instruments rather than civic coinage in any conventional sense, intended to function in commercial transactions with Ptolemaic Egypt and the wider Hellenistic world, which explains the Attic weight standard.

Huth 158 is among the more precisely catalogued Minaean types; the sequence established by Huth remains the primary reference framework for Arabian silver of this period.