Numidian Physical Appearance

I've had trouble trying to pin down the the actual appearance of the North African Numidians. I don't know if they were as olive-skinned as most modern day Libyans are or if the were in fact black-skinned. Perhaps they were ethnically heterogenous as present day Amazighen populations? Coins of Numidian kings depicts them as being Caucasian, I don't know if they're based off Hellenistic coins or if they in fact really looked this way.

Also, while Wiki mentions the presence of Black Africans serving in the Punic military, they aren't actually identified by any sort of ethnicity. Perhaps they were just numerically interspersed among the native Libyan and Liby-Phoenician contigents?
 
I don't think we can really be sure, bar a large-scale survey of skulls found, but generally speaking I'd expect the Numidians to have looked Mediterranean. We have depictions, not just of kings, but also of "generic" Numidians and wealthy individuals from the Roman period, and they tend to agree on this. There was a convention on depicting "blacks", and the Numidian portraits did not follow it. Of course that doesn't mean there were no individuals we would today iden tify as "black" - race is a continuum, and a lot of northern Europeans are surprised how "African" many Mediterraneans look. But Shaka Zulu it isn't.
 
Kind of Berberish north African, I should imagine. Not quite Mediterranean, but not Black either. Not that their physical appearence matters much, as it seems largely to be used in arguments about Afro-centric or Euro-centric dick wavers...
 
The word 'Sudan' comes from the Arabic Bilad as-Sudan (البلاد السودان), which translates as 'land of the blacks.' In its original use Sudan referred to of the Sahel region. That's a fairly strong argument, IMHO, for the pre-Islamic Conquest Numidians to have been quite dark skinned.
 
The word 'Sudan' comes from the Arabic Bilad as-Sudan (البلاد السودان), which translates as 'land of the blacks.' In its original use Sudan referred to of the Sahel region. That's a fairly strong argument, IMHO, for the pre-Islamic Conquest Numidians to have been quite dark skinned.
Well, the Numidians wern't from the Sahel though, most of them were from modern day Algeria and Tunisia.
 
Just pick the Berbers as a general guide, the Kabylians and the Chaoui in particular considering they live more or less within the limits of ancient Numidia.
 
If I had to hazard a guess I'd expect the mix to be slightly darker today then it was at that time. The primary route for the slave trade to West Africa went straight through the region for centuries. That would have had an effect, if only a minor one.
 
Would they have looked any different from the ancient Egyptians of the time?

I suppose the Egyptians would have said so, but I doubt we'd have seen much of a difference. Bear in mind the civilisation of the Roman Mediterranean had already been mixed fairly thoroughly be centuries of migrations, wars, trade and slaving. While you had fairly distinctive "outgroups" like the Keltoskythoi (everyone with light hair and eyes, except those that lived inside the civilised world) or the Aithiopes ("black" Africans), the evidence for people "looking" Greek, Egyptian or Spanish is thin on the ground.
 
Some of the online sources I did run in to included what looked to be articles by Afrocentric "dick-wavers" and I couldn't rely on their objectivity. I don't want to prove one over the other. I've seen photos of Kabylians, Chaoui, Riffians from northern Morocco, and Tuaregs, so anyone of those were likely present in the Magreb region 2000 years ago as today.
 
For the royal house at least, it could probably vary quite a lot over a few generations. As with the Pharaohs and Ottoman Sultans later on. A standard tall dark and handsome Italian-looking King with a Circassian concubine could spawn heirs of significantly different racial identity to those he might sire from a Sub-saharan concubine, and so on; basically the consort serves to either darken or lighten up the next generation.
 
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