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According to the United Nations, a genocide is:

any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Notwithstanding the quantitative differences, due perhaps to technological advances and large populations, what is the first historical instance that we could define in modern terms as a "genocide"?

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3 Answers 3

Genocide far predates history. A typical tribal raid, where all the men are killed, the women are taken, and children are either taken off or killed, would qualify. Chimpanzee troops have been observed to do this to each other as well, so most likely this is a behavior we shared with our human/chimp ancestors at least 4.6 million years ago when we diverged.

Evil acts such as murder and genocide are, sadly, a typical human/chimp behavior. We like to think this is something only "monsters" or crazy people (IOW, not normal humans like us) do, but that is sadly not so.

For more info on this topic, I can recommend Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing. It's a very tough read though.

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Genocide is one of the hypotheses brought forth for the extinction of the Neanderthals, 30.000 years ago.

An early example of gendercide from recorded history is the destruction of Melos by the Athenians in 416 BC, during the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides, in Book 5 of his History of the Peloponnesian War gives a detailed account of the negotiations between the Melians and the Athenians that ends with the gendercide, after the negotiations broke down:

Summer was now over. The next winter the Lacedaemonians intended to invade the Argive territory, but arriving at the frontier found the sacrifices for crossing unfavourable, and went back again. This intention of theirs gave the Argives suspicions of certain of their fellow citizens, some of whom they arrested; others, however, escaped them. About the same time the Melians again took another part of the Athenian lines which were but feebly garrisoned. Reinforcements afterwards arriving from Athens in consequence, under the command of Philocrates, son of Demeas, the siege was now pressed vigorously; and some treachery taking place inside, the Melians surrendered at discretion to the Athenians, who put to death all the grown men whom they took, and sold the women and children for slaves, and subsequently sent out five hundred colonists and inhabited the place themselves.

Source: Richard Crawley's translation, The Internet Classics Archive.

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Arguably, the first genocide was attempted in Persia, and against the Jews, as related in the Biblical book of Esther.

A Persian court official named Haman had been promoted to a position second only to the king Ahasurus (Xerxes) and every man was supposed to bow down before Haman. One man refused to do so, a Jew named Mordecai. Haman became so enraged that he persuaded the king to allow him to order the killing of every Jew, and to hang Mordecai. What he did not know was that Mordecai was the adoptive father of Esther, the new Queen, or that she was a Jew. To make a long story short, Mordecai and Esther worked together to thwart the attempted "Holocaust," and got Haman hanged in the bargain.

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