10 Dinars Jugurtha

Jugurtha, the Numidian king who fought Rome to a standstill across nearly two decades before being betrayed by his own father-in-law Bocchus in 105 BC, was a politically charged choice for Algerian coinage in the 1990s — a period when the state was actively reasserting pre-colonial, pre-Arab identity amid a brutal civil conflict with Islamist insurgents. The Bank of Algeria issued this silver piece as part of a broader commemorative program drawing on indigenous North African history rather than Ottoman or French administrative heritage.

Jugurtha died in a Roman prison, starved to death following Marius's triumph.