The Numidians

← Encyclopedia

On the high plains west of Carthage, a man could be set on a horse before he could walk, and learn to turn the animal by the press of a knee and a stick laid against its neck, with neither bit in its mouth nor saddle on its back. The riders who came out of that country were the most feared light cavalry of the ancient Mediterranean, and for the better part of two centuries no great power in the western sea fought a campaign without reckoning what they would do. They were the Numidians: the Berber people of the eastern Maghreb, whom the Romans called the Numidae, the nomads, though the name outlived the wandering and came to mean a kingdom, a dynasty, and a line of kings who minted coins and built towns and were buried under stone mountains.

The People of the Eastern Plains

The lands of the Numidians lay in what is now eastern Algeria and the Tunisian borderlands, a country of high inland plains and coastal hills bounded by the Moulouya River to the west — which divided them from the western Berbers, the Mauri — and by the Carthaginian hinterland to the east, with the Mediterranean to the north and, to the south, the desert margins where the Gaetulians ranged. They were an indigenous North African people, of the Berber stock the ancients lumped together as Libyans, speaking a Berber tongue that has no certain written literature of its own and survives chiefly in names and inscriptions. To call them nomads is half true and half a Roman convenience. Much of the population moved with its herds across the seasonal pastures of the plateau, but the country also held cultivators, and the kings would push hard toward a settled life.

For a long time the Numidians were not one people but many, organized as tribes and as two great tribal federations whose rivalry shaped everything that followed. In the east lay the Massylii, a Berber confederation drawn together out of smaller groups in the centuries before Rome reached Africa, with their seat at Cirta — the modern Constantine, a city set on a gorge-girt rock that has been inhabited ever since. In the west lay the Masaesyli, the larger of the two in their day, ranging across the plateaus toward the Mauri border with a royal seat at Siga near the mouth of the Tafna. Between the two confederations ran the fault along which the whole history of Numidia would break: when Carthage and Rome fell to war, the eastern and western Berbers took opposite sides, and out of that division a single kingdom was forged by the man who happened to be on the winning one.

These are facts that come to us almost entirely from outside. The Numidians did not write their own annals, or none survive; what we know of their tribes and territories is drawn from the Greek and Roman geographers and historians, who saw the Maghreb from the deck of a Carthaginian or Roman ship and had their own reasons for the way they drew the map. The exact bounds of the Massylii and the Masaesyli, and the degree to which either was a true polity rather than a shifting alliance of clans, remain matters that scholars reconstruct and argue over rather than read off a settled record. What is not in doubt is the rivalry, the two capitals, and the names of the kings who emerged from the contest.

The Medracen (Madghacen), royal mausoleum of the Numidian kings near Batna, Algeria — a Berber stepped tumulus faced with engaged Doric columns and an Egyptian-style cornice, dated to the fourth century BCE or the age of Massinissa. Zakaria Mimouni, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The Cavalry, the Kings, and the Punic Inheritance

What the Numidians were known for first and last was the horse. Their mounts were small, hardy animals, ancestors of the Barb, bred for speed and stamina over long distances rather than for the weight of a charge. Their riders carried a clutch of javelins, a short sword, and a light shield of leather or a leopard’s hide, and wore next to no armor. They controlled the animal, the ancient writers note again and again, without bridle or saddle — a cord around the neck and a stick were enough. In battle they did not crash into a line. They rode up in loose order, flung their javelins, wheeled away before the enemy could close, and came again; a cloud of horsemen that could not be caught and could not be pinned, that exhausted heavy cavalry and stripped foot-soldiers of their flanks. The Greek historian Polybius, who had Roman patrons and reliable informants, treated them as among the decisive arms of the age.

For most of the third century these horsemen rode for Carthage. Numidian cavalry served the Barcid generals in Spain and in Italy; Hannibal screened his army and savaged Roman supply with them, and it was Numidian horse that hunted the Roman flanks at Cannae and the river crossings of the Italian campaign. The relationship was mercenary and dynastic at once: Carthage paid and married into the Numidian houses, and the Numidian kings supplied the one arm the Punic city could not raise from its own citizens. Then came the war that made the kingdom. In the Second Punic War the eastern Massylii, under their king Gala, were Carthage’s allies, and his son Massinissa — born around 238 BCE, raised in part at Carthage — commanded Numidian horse for the Punic cause in Spain while still a young man. The western Masaesyli, under the ambitious Syphax, leaned toward Rome. Then the alliances reversed. Watching the Roman commander Scipio, Massinissa judged where the war was going and changed sides; Syphax, drawn into Carthage’s orbit by a famous marriage, went the other way. At the Battle of the Great Plains and then at the decisive field of Zama in 202 BCE, it was Massinissa’s cavalry, riding on the Roman right against Hannibal’s own Numidians, that drove the Carthaginian horse from the field and returned to fall on the rear of the phalanx. The light horsemen of the high plains, in the end, decided which empire would hold the western sea.

Massinissa’s reward was a kingdom. With Syphax taken at Cirta and carried off to die in Rome, the Massylian king received his rival’s western realm and ruled, from his capital at Cirta, a Numidia that stretched across the eastern Maghreb — the first unified Berber state. He held it for half a century, dying around 148 BCE at a great age, reportedly still in the saddle. What he did with that long reign is the second thing the Numidians are remembered for. He set himself to make a settled kingdom out of a pastoral one: introducing or pressing Carthaginian methods of agriculture, fixing tribesmen to the land as cultivators, building up towns — Capsa, Thugga, Bulla Regia, Hippo Regius among them — until the Roman writers credited him with the very sedentarization of his people and Numidia became a granary that fed Rome. He minted coins, bronze pieces bearing a bearded royal head on one face and a galloping or rearing horse on the other, sometimes with a few Punic letters; the horse, fittingly, was the emblem of the kingdom the cavalry had won.

Bronze coin of the Kingdom of Numidia, attributed to Massinissa or his successors (third to second century BCE): a bearded, diademed royal head and, on the reverse, a horse. © The Trustees of the British Museum, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The kingdom Massinissa built lay against Carthage, and it drank deeply from that Punic well. The Numidians worshiped the gods of their Carthaginian neighbors alongside their own: above all Baal Hammon, the elder lord of the Punic world, who in the Roman centuries of the Maghreb would be honored across the province under the name of Saturn, in the cult that scholars call Saturn Africanus — a Roman-facing name laid over an African and Punic god, the kind of double identity that runs through everything the Numidians took from the coast. The goddess Tanit, Carthage’s great heavenly mother, was honored in their towns as well. They wrote, when they wrote, in a script that married the two worlds: the Libyco-Berber alphabet, a geometric, mostly consonantal writing set down to render the Berber tongue, of disputed origin but plainly shaped in the orbit of the Phoenician and Punic letters that the coast had carried west. Its eastern variant is read today largely through bilingual texts — Libyco-Berber set beside Punic — of which the most famous come from the monuments at Dougga, the ancient Thugga, including a dedication tied to Massinissa and the mausoleum of a Numidian prince, recovered early in the twentieth century. The same script’s descendant, Tifinagh, is still written by the Tuareg, who call its letters, by an old memory, the Punic ones. Whether the alphabet was borrowed directly from the Phoenician model or invented locally under its influence is itself contested; what is clear is that a Berber people on the inland plateau, with no maritime trade of its own, came to write its language in a form shaped by the letters the sea-traders had brought to the African shore.

Yet the Numidians were never simply lesser Carthaginians. They kept their own kings, their own tongue, their own way of war, and their own forms of the monumental — most strikingly in their royal tombs. Near Batna stands the Medracen, a great stepped drum of cut stone faced with engaged Doric columns and crowned with an Egyptian-style cornice, raised over a Numidian king in the fourth century BCE or the age of Massinissa: a Berber tumulus in form, clothed in the architectural vocabulary of the whole eastern Mediterranean. It is the kingdom in a single building — African in its bones, Punic and Hellenistic and Egyptian in its dress, and entirely its own. The degree to which Numidia was “Punicized,” and how far the Carthaginian veneer reached below the level of the kings and the towns into the life of the herding tribes, is a question still weighed by archaeologists rather than answered; the safest thing to say is that the kingdom stood at the meeting of the African interior and the Punic coast and belonged wholly to neither.

That meeting did not survive its kings intact. After Massinissa the kingdom passed through his sons, and then, in a bloody contest for the succession, fell to his grandson Jugurtha — a capable, ruthless prince who murdered one cousin, drove out another, and seized the throne against Rome’s wishes. The war that followed, fought across Numidia through the years around 112 to 105 BCE, ground on while Roman commanders were bribed and beaten in turn, until Gaius Marius took the command and Jugurtha was at last run down — betrayed, in the end, not on the field but by his father-in-law Bocchus, king of the western Berbers, who handed him over in chains to Marius’s quaestor, the young Sulla. Jugurtha was carried to Rome, paraded in Marius’s triumph, and put to death in the prison beneath the Capitol in 104 BCE. Numidia, broken into client kingdoms, would not become a Roman province in full until decades later.

What the Romans Made of Them, and What Was Recovered

Almost everything narrative we know of the Numidians comes through Rome, and most of it through one book. The historian Sallust, who had himself governed in Africa, made the war against Jugurtha the subject of his monograph the Bellum Jugurthinum, the Jugurthine War. It is a Roman work with a Roman thesis — Sallust uses the African war as a mirror in which to show the corruption of the late Republic, the senators who took Numidian gold, the rot at the center that let a barbarian king buy his way out of justice again and again. Jugurtha is drawn as formidable and treacherous at once; the Numidians appear as the occasion for a Roman moral lesson rather than as a people examined in their own right. To read Sallust for the Numidians is therefore to read against the grain of what he meant to write — to take the king’s energy and the kingdom’s resources, which the indictment of Rome requires him to grant, and set aside the frame of African perfidy versus Roman virtue in which he sets them. The same caution governs the rest of the record. Polybius and the others give us the cavalry because the cavalry shaped wars Greeks and Romans cared about; they give us Massinissa because he was useful to Scipio. The Numidians enter history at the points where they touched the powers that wrote.

Against the slant of the literary record stands the ground itself. The towns the kings built, the great royal monuments — the Medracen, and the later tomb of the Christian-era kings near Tipasa — the cemeteries, and the coins are evidence the Numidians left in their own hand, or at least their own stone, and they say things the histories do not. The bilingual inscriptions of Dougga give back a little of the lost language and the offices of the kingdom. The coinage shows a state confident enough to put its king’s face and its emblem on metal. The architecture shows a court reaching for the whole Mediterranean repertoire of grandeur. None of it is a Numidian chronicle; the language’s literature, if there was one, is gone. But it is enough to correct the histories on the one point that matters most — that this was a kingdom, with kings who built and minted and were buried like kings, and not a tribal hinterland waiting to be civilized by its neighbors.

That correction is, in large part, the work of the modern era. For a long time the Berber kingdoms were read exactly as the Roman sources framed them: as adjuncts and clients, the Numidians as Carthage’s auxiliaries and then Rome’s, of interest mainly for the horsemen they supplied and the wars they complicated. The recovery of Numidia and its western neighbor Mauretania as states in their own right — Berber powers that allied, fought, governed, and built on their own account, rather than as supporting players in the duel of Carthage and Rome — belongs to the archaeology and the scholarship of the last century and more, and to the people of the Maghreb themselves, for whom Massinissa and Jugurtha became founders rather than footnotes. The horsemen who rode without bridle across the high plains were the spear-arm of other men’s empires for two hundred years; the kingdom they won at Zama, and the kings who ruled it from the rock of Cirta, were their own.

→ Related: The Carthaginians · The Mauretanians · Carthage · Phoenicia · Phoenician Religion · Baal Hammon · Tanit · Melqart · The Phoenicians · Tyre · Sidon · Astarte · Baal · Canaan · The Canaanites · Tophet · Motya · Kerkouane · Tharros · Hercules