The states of the Middle East were not set down by Sykes and Georges-Picot or in Paris or San Remo. The line-up of polities in the region changed over time as some polities vanished and new ones appeared. Depending on criteria, between 31 and 68 autonomous territorial polities that existed in the region after 1914 disappeared. Some of these, such as the Kingdom of the Hijaz (1916-25), are well known and studied; others, such as Ras Al-Khaimah's brief stint as an independent state (1971-72), have been largely ignored. This paper defines the universe of these defunct states and develops a typology of how they "died," or vanished from the map. Building upon Davies's (2012) study of European polities that vanished, I identify six mechanisms of state death: implosion, conquest, merger, liquidation, 'infant mortality,' and collective abdication. The paper explains each of these mechanisms and uses case studies from five different decades (1920s-60s) and five extant states to demonstrate them. The cases are: The Tripolitanian Republic (1918-23, infant mortality); Hatay State (1937-39, collective abdication); The Republic of Mahabad (1946, conquest); The Tangier International Zone (1923-56, merger); and The United Arab Republic (1958-61, liquidation). I present data on the full list of defunct states and use GIS to map and display them. While the international relations literature on state death focuses on conquest, I find that relatively peaceful mergers are a common cause of state death in the MENA. No MENA states died via implosion or violent dissolution. Unless the Ottoman Empire is counted as a "defunct state," there is no regional precedent like the Soviet Union, Federation of Yugoslavia, or Austro-Hungarian Empire. The findings of the paper suggest that we cannot fully understand state-building in the Middle East by only looking at the states that exist today; we also need to identify and compare them with polities that existed but did not survive. The paper directly speaks to the MESA meeting theme of "Without Boundaries" by identifying historical incarnations of states and constructed boundaries that once existed and explaining the mechanism by which they vanished from the map.