Around 2334–2279 BCE Sargon of Akkad defeated Lugalzagesi of Uruk, tore down the walls of Uruk, Ur and other cities, laid waste the territory of Lagash to the sea and placed the Sumerian city-states under governors loyal to Akkad, creating the first state to rule all of southern Mesopotamia. On Sargon's death a coalition led by Kaku of Ur, with Adab, Lagash, Zabalam and Kazallu, revolted, and his son Rimush (c. 2279–2270 BCE) reconquered these cities together with Umma and Der. Rimush's inscriptions record each campaign with exact counts of men struck down, captives taken and men expelled from their cities, and the destruction of city walls, amounting in total to tens of thousands of people. The evidence is almost entirely the kings' own commemorative inscriptions, and the figures are royal claims of victory rather than counts that can be checked. Lemos and Richardson's chapter in The Cambridge World History of Genocide (2023) treats the reprisals of Rimush and Naram-Sin against rebellious Sumerian cities as the earliest Mesopotamian evidence of mass violence, while concluding that whether they amount to genocide depends on definitions and on whether targeted destruction of cities counts.
Sargon of Akkad conquered the Sumerian city-states of southern Mesopotamia, and his son Rimush suppressed their revolt, recording in his inscriptions the men killed, captured and expelled from each rebel city
There is no census or administrative total for Sumer as a whole in the Sargonic period, and no reconstruction of its population that Rimush's figures could be set against, so any percentage would be invented.
No independent death toll exists. Rimush's inscriptions claim roughly 56,000 men struck down across his Sumerian campaigns, and a further category 'expelled and annihilated' whose fate is ambiguous; these are royal victory claims with no external check, and Sargon's earlier conquest records no casualty figures. Giving a range would launder the king's numbers into a total.
Rimush's own inscriptions (RIME 2.01.02, via CDLI) record thousands of men struck down in each rebel city, and Lemos and Richardson (Cambridge World History of Genocide, 2023) analyse these reprisals as mass violence against the Sumerian cities.
Iraq