I think I first heard of the Numidians when I read Harold Lamb’s Hannibal. That happened to be the first Harold Lamb I ever read. You used to run across the Bantam paperback editions of Lamb in used bookstores on a regular basis. Hannibal is also one of Lamb’s better histories as the the details are tighter.

That is where I first read of Syphax and Masinissa. I came aware of the Berbers, those Caucasoid peoples with their own language who inhabited  Africa north of the Niger River.

A fairly new Osprey Men-at-Arms booklet is The Numidians 300 BC-AD 300 by William Horsted with illustrations by Adam Hook. You are going to learn the most you will ever know about the Numidians in this booklet.

The Numidians were famous as Hannibal’s light cavalry. They were the reconnaissance, harassed the enemy, and pursued the defeated. The Numidians wore no armor, did not carry swords, and rode bareback. They used a single rein on a simple collar and used a rod to direct the horse. That is it. Their main weapon was the throwing javelin.

The Romans eagerly recruited them for various campaigns. Jugurtha fought Marius and Sulla. Juba picked the wrong side in fighting against Julius Caesar and lost in the Battle of Thapsus in 46 B.C. The Romans ended the Numidian kingdom incorporating it into their empire.

The Romans continued to use Numidian light cavalry as they are portrayed on Trajan’s column.

Horsted delves into some of the other forces in the Numidian kingdom. They had recruited some Romans to train an infantry force. I found it interesting the Numidians used the now extinct North African forest elephant. They sent some to Spain to fight alongside the Romans against the Celt-Iberians. Those North African elephants were smaller than the Indian elephant and around 8 foot tall. They might have been a separate species.

For you war-gamers using a Classical setting or looking to spice things up for a fantasy setting, this is a nice booklet on specialists in ancient warfare.

If you can find Tim Newark’s The Barbarians (with Angus McBride art), he devotes space to the Berbers fighting the Vandals. The Vandals demolished Roman North Africa allowing a Berber resurgence. The Berbers used camels which they would form into a circle. The Vandal horses shied away from the camels while the Berbers pelted the Vandals with javelins.

Manly Wade Wellman researched the Berbers for decades for his final novel, Cahena. The Berbers use the javelin as their main weapon. Get Cahena and read it. Might be in my top 5 novels.

Horsted does not ignore the horses. The Numidians used a version of the Barb that was smaller and more hardy. I never had any experience with the Barb breed of horse but read once the American Mustang is a feral version of the Barb.