The Gétules are a people of nomadic pastoralists present over vast regions of northwestern Africa, south of Numidia and Mauretania, during Antiquity and the Roman occupation of Africa. Strabo makes them southern neighbors of the Garamantes.
In the year 6 of our era, they revolt against Juba II and seem to support the Romans in the war which opposes them to Jugurtha. Virgil also makes their king -legendary?- Iarbas and his men the representatives of a people of formidable warriors and Strabo describes them as "the most powerful of the Libyan nations". The colony of Madaure was founded, following Apuleius, to monitor these populations. . The Roman author Pliny the Elder mentions the power of two Gétule tribes:the Baniurae and the Autotoles (sometimes called Autololes or Galaules). The Baniurae occupied the Sebou valley and threatened the Roman colony of Banasa, not far from present-day Sidi Kassem. The Autololes originate from the valley of the current Bou Regreg wadi. Pliny the Elder describes them as particularly dangerous barbarians who are always ready to plunder. Sallust, in his work The War of Jugurtha, presents them with the ancient Libyans as "rough, coarse, fed on the flesh of wild animals, eating grass like beasts".
La Gétulie is known in Latin sources for its purple and tawny.
Although the Getulian tribes never formed a real state – and Juba II claimed to be king of the Numidians and the Getulians – they contributed greatly to the Moorish and Numidian kingdoms. They thus devain to support the armies of Hannibal and Juba II. Pastoralists and nomads, they organize raids against farmers settled in their area of influence. According to the historian Jehan Desanges, the term "Gétules" moreover designates more a way of life than a precise and homogeneous people, additional proof of the "great onomastic flexibility" (Yves Mondéran) of the Berber peoples in the Roman sources but also that the reality of the term is neither ethnic nor political.
At the end of Antiquity, they came into contact with the Zénètes, peoples who perhaps accentuated their migration in the 5th century.