I was going, in my head, “I know the Babylonians and like one other one were really really into resettling, it was super uncommon. Eh fuck it, I’ll just put the Persians, the whole ancient Egyptian thing is what really blows that whole settler-colonial thing out of the water.” And then it was just a matter of figuring out whether I wanted to mention that the Jewish people who had been resettled by the Babylonians basically made up a story about being previously resettled in Egypt, in an attempt to foster a whole “We have been resettled once before and God brought us back.” parallelism with the Babylonian exile (which is a huge part of Jewish myth-making), which ended up being a huge part of the Old Testament, which is partially why people who’s only real exposure to history is like, the Bible and the Roman Empire (because of the Bible) (who also were not huge on resettlement, but arguably did some genocide on the Gauls), thinking it was common, when the archaeological record does not support that.

I should really look more into the Neo-Assyrians, if their records are better kept. Probably a bunch of cool reading or podcasts around it.