In his seminal work The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington reinvented Arnold Toynbee’s understanding of history as driven not only by impersonal material structures—territory, capital, population, and natural resources—but equally by interpersonal ide- ational structures. This perception seemed supported by empirical observation, and soon filled the intellectual and political lacunae which had attained particular salience in the wake of the implosion of Soviet-backed communism. Oftentimes, the reinstatement of religion—as the single most stable ideational structure in human history—was referred to as ‘the revenge of God’, but for social scientists and historians alike it became impossible to scientifically isolate the divine variable from terrestrial imperatives in the muddled socio-political praxes of earthlings. A casual observation, nonetheless, would suggest that discursive constructions about God (in politics, a short-hand for absolute truth) have been a necessary corollary to nearly all conflictual formations, from the substate to the transstate levels. The intensity of this linkage, and its constancy, is tested in this study. body count Objectives The present study attempts to quantify the human death toll of religious and political violence throughout the last two millennia and relating these to religio-cultural civiliza- tions. Adopting a modified version of Huntington’s civiliza- tional taxonomy, the study progresses along the following lines: First, a comprehensive data list of over 3,000 violent clashes in history, 0–2008 ce was developed. We then pro- ceeded to identify 276 of the most violent conflicts in his- tory, all with estimated human death tolls over 10,000, and ranked them by death toll. The result was then organized along civilizational lines, in order to attain a comparative understanding of socio-religiously conditioned violence. The findings are represented in four tables, leading to a comparative evaluation of civilizational violence. Methodology The study has first produced an aggregate list of major violent conflicts in the last two millennia, incorporating four categories of violence, namely war, civil war, democide, and structural violence. This shows the extent to which vio- lence has been an almost universal form of ‘doing politics’ in all parts of the inhabited world for as long as history has been recorded. The study then proceeded to quantify the death tolls in the most violent episodes to produce a list of the most violent conflicts in the last two millennia. These conflicts were then organized along civilizational lines,