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Lot of folks say Hannibal Barca was black.

I don't think so.

What do you think.

Could his bust possibly make it any harder to figure out?

He wasn't, from what I've seen.

Hannibal Barca is great tho.

Depends on what is your definiton of great though.

Anyways, Hannibal was the son of the leader of the carthaginians. Carthaginians are the descendents of phoenician settlers that esablished a colony on north africa from tthe region of syria or palestine. These people have white skin.

Although that doesn't close the possibility that hannibal's blood may be a mix of both phoenician and african.

Great as in he was a mastermind until his eventual loss to Rome.

Carthage was known for being rather multi-ethnic for it's time though, so it wouldn't be a stretch to assume it had a mix of darker (Libyans or Nubians, per se) peoples. My real dig is that it seems to be grasping at straws to think a foreign family would ascend into the patriarchy of Carthage.

In my opinion, he was like a darker skinned Semite. There is a frequent misconception that North African peoples and cultures were/are exactly akin to the African countries "below" Sudan and Western Sahara.

They maybe foreign, but as long as they reign supreme, any foreigner can rule in a foreign land. Just remember that at one point, the roman empire was ruled by germans.

Gifted with high APM and micro-management skills at a young age, Hannibal was able to rush Iron Age and produce a metric assload of War Elephants to bum rush Rome.

"Lol @ this fucking noob" Hannibal thought to himself, "He doesn't have anything that won't get pwned by my elephants."

Hannibal started killing Rome's workers and fishing boats along the Rhone river.

"Wow dude ur a real fucking dick." Scipio raged.

Hannibal thought that victory was all but certain until he saw the first few elephants get pwned. Since all his units had low Fog-of-War vision, he took heavy losses when he realized that the Romans had massed Scorpions. To make matter worse, the Romans had made Priests to WOLOLO some of his war elephants, adding to the ensuing chaos.

"Fuck it, no big deal," Hannibal resigned, "I'll just make more units and…"

Hannibal spat out his Mountain Dew as he realized Rome had Catapult Triremes attacking his city, with Legion swordsman fucking up all his villagers.

"Wow GG fucking stupid Iberia doesn't help" said Hannibal, rage-quitting.

I'm going to have to ask for a source on that one, I've never heard of a purely Germanic Emperor in Rome.

He's probably talking about the Visigoths bum-rushing the already beleaguered Western Roman Empire. They hardly "ruled" at all.

Yeah, the records on those are pretty vague, so i can't go deep into it.

There is a better example. The Diadochi. Basically, Greeks who ruled over foreign lands. Examples include The Ptolemy and the Seleucids.

The Hellenistic rulers of the Near East were the result of Military Conquest, a different concept entirely. The question is if the Barca family could rise to power in an economic or political manner being of another race, which seems rather unlikely given the lack of political correctness.

@Crabtree: That would have been the Ostrogoths. Visigoths were the ones in Iberia.

Lol yeah…I realized the error but couldn't get to editing it in time.

While there was an unsurprising lack of political correctness, prejudices weren't based on race but on culture/nationality. It had nothing to do with your skin tone and everything to do with where you were from. Since Carthage was a very diverse society at the time it's not unreasonable for him to be at least partially black. I doubt he would be completely black however as Barca is a semetic name, he probably had at least one semetic ancestor especially if he were to be part of a ruling family in Carthatge.

i dont think he was a black african (negroid) not a single image of him shows him with negroid features , he could definitely have a dark tan skin considering the fact he came from a continent where the local climate is much hotter than in europe , he could have looked like a typical middle eastern person . the origins of the carthaginian people might be from the middle east .