Before 1490
According to Canadian scholar Adam Jones, if a dominant group of people had little in common with a marginalized group of people, it was easy for the dominant group to define the other as subhuman. As a result, the marginalized group might be labeled as a threat that must be eliminated. Jones continues: "The difficulty, as Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn pointed out in their early study, is that such historical records as exist are ambiguous and undependable. While history today is generally written with some fealty to 'objective' facts, most previous accounts aimed rather to praise the writer's patron (normally the leader) and to emphasize the superiority of one's own gods and religious beliefs."
Wrote Chalk and Jonassohn: "Historically and anthropologically peoples have always had a name for themselves. In a great many cases, that name meant 'the people' to set the owners of that name off against all other people who were considered of lesser quality in some way. If the differences between the people and some other society were particularly large in terms of religion, language, manners, customs, and so on, then such others were seen as less than fully human: pagans, savages, or even animals."
Ancient genocides
Scholars of antiquity differentiate genocide from gendercide, in which groups of people were conquered and the males who belonged to the conquered groups were killed but the children (particularly girls) and women were incorporated into the conquering groups. Jones notes, "Chalk and Jonassohn provide a wide-ranging selection of historical events such as the Assyrian Empire's root-and branch depredations in the first half of the first millennium BCE, and the destruction of Melos by Athens during the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE), a gendercidal rampage described by Thucydides in his 'Melian Dialogue'.
Massacres which are recorded in religious scriptures like the Hebrew Bible have also been described as genocides, such as the destruction of the Midianites by the Israelites which is described in Numbers 31:7–18, an event which took place in the 2nd millennium BCE. Jones notes that this massacre is an example of the partial destruction and the partial incorporation of an enemy ethnicity.
Destruction of Carthage
During the Third Punic War, the city of Carthage was besieged by Roman forces for three years (149–146 BCE). Once the city was breached, the Romans spent seven days systematically destroying it and killing its inhabitants. Ben Kiernan has labelled the devastation of the city and the massacre of its population "The First Genocide".
Asiatic Vespers
In 88 BCE, King Mithridates VI of Pontus ordered the murder of all Italics in Asia Minor, resulting in the deaths of about 100,000, mainly civilians. The death toll makes it one of the deadliest recorded genocides in classical antiquity. This action provoked the Romans, leading to the First Mithridatic War.
Tencteri and Usipetes
Julius Caesar's campaign against the Tencteri and Usipetes has been characterized as genocidal.
Gallic Wars
During the Gallic Wars Caesar reported that he burnt every village and building that he could find in the territory of the Eburones, drove off all of the cattle, and his men and beasts consumed all of the corn that the weather of the autumnal season had not destroyed. He left those who had hid themselves, if there were any, alive in the hope that they would all die of hunger in the winter. Caesar said that he wanted to annihilate the Eburones as well as their name, and indeed, we hear nothing more about the Eburones. Their country was soon occupied by a Germanic tribe with a different name, the Tungri. However, the report by Tacitus which states that the Tungri were the original "Germani" who first crossed the Rhine, and the way this matches Caesar's description of the Eburones and their neighbours, leads to the possibility that they survived under a new name.