This chapter explores the related questions of whether or not genocide is found in sources from ancient Mesopotamia and whether ancient Mesopotamian empires carried out genocidal violence. The chapter focuses on the three most relevant sets of sources from Mesopotamia: evidence from the 23rd century BCE related to the violent reprisals of two kings of Akkad, Rimuš and Naram-Sin, against the “rebellious” cities of Sumer and Elam; the Sumerian “city laments” dating to a few centuries later; and first-millennium BCE Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions. This examination demonstrates that, while mass violence is hardly rare in accounts of Mesopotamian history, finding evidence for genocide is not a straightforward task. Whether or not the Mesopotamians practiced genocide hinges on how one defines that term, and whether the targeted destruction of cities constitutes a type of genocide. In addition to an exploration of urbicide as genocide, the chapter considers how Mesopotamian accounts of mass violence contributed to accounts and practices of violence, including genocidal violence, elsewhere in ancient West Asia in later periods.

This chapter explores the pervasiveness of narratives of genocide and mass violence in Israelite and early Jewish sources and relate this genocidal impulse to the interethnic violence that occurred in the ancient Levant in different periods. It argues that various historical factors contributed to the prevalence of extreme violence in these sources: the brutality of imperialistic aggression carried out against the Israelites by several ancient Near Eastern empires; the demographic shifts that contributed to material scarcities in the Iron Age II and the Hellenistic-Roman era; and the dichotomized processes of ethnic boundary-marking that characterize so many Israelite and early Jewish texts. The merging of these factors generated an abundance of literature depicting genocide and other forms of mass violence.

Recent decades have seen the rise of violence related to Hindu nationalist movements in India, the Muslim Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, the militant Khalistan movement of Sikhs in India’s Punjab, and Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka and elsewhere in the region. These movements have competed in the context of a secular political order that was the legacy of British colonial rule, once embraced by founding leaders such as Pakistan’s Muhammad Ali Jinnah and India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, who advocated the nationalism of ‘secularism and socialism’. Though each of these political ideologies has its own history and internal dynamics, each is also related to the others. They have arisen as mutual responses to one another and to the global influences of colonialism, transnational religion, and globalization that have buffeted South Asian politics in recent years.