Juba II was the last great Berber ruler of antiquity, a king and a scholar who governed the Mauretanian kingdom from the Atlantic to western Algeria from approximately 25 BCE to 23 CE. He was the son of Juba I of Numidia, who committed suicide after the defeat at Thapsus in 46 BCE; the infant Juba II was taken to Rome and paraded in Caesar's African triumph.
Raised at the household of Octavian and educated alongside the future emperor's children, Juba II became one of the most learned figures of the Augustan court. He wrote in Greek on the geography, ethnography, and natural history of Africa, Arabia, and Egypt; his works, preserved only in fragments through later citation, included an Arabia, a Libyca, and a treatise on the Euphrates river. Pliny the Elder cites him repeatedly as a primary authority.
Augustus restored the Mauretanian kingdom to him around 25 BCE and arranged his marriage to Cleopatra Selene II, the surviving daughter of Cleopatra VII and Mark Antony — a union that linked the Berber royal line to the Ptolemaic and Seleucid dynasties. The royal capital was established at Iol, refounded as Caesarea (modern Cherchell on the Algerian coast); Volubilis served as a secondary centre in the western kingdom.
Juba's son Ptolemy succeeded him in 23 CE and was assassinated in 40 CE on the orders of Caligula, after which the Mauretanian kingdom was annexed and divided into two Roman provinces. Juba II's reign is conventionally treated as the high point of the Berber-Hellenistic synthesis of late antiquity.