If you slay an undead creature can you cast animate dead on the corpse to bring it back as a zombie or skeleton?
[RPG] Can you reanimate a slain undead with Animated Dead
dnd-3.5enecromancyspellsundead
Related Solutions
No.
As indicated by the Sage Advice Compendium (2017):
Can you use dispel magic on the creations of a spell like animate dead or affect those creations with antimagic field?
Whenever you wonder whether a spell’s effects can be dispelled or suspended, you need to answer one question: is the spell’s duration instantaneous? If the answer is yes, there is nothing to dispel or suspend.
So, yes, duration is entirely relevant.
The entry goes on to detail why it functions this way, to paraphrase though: the effect that animates the dead is instantaneously brought into being by magic, but is not continuously sustained by magic afterwards. Therefore, skeletons can enter an antimagic field at their leisure and hack you to bits.
Of note: Danse macabre has a duration on the spell and therefore you could dispel one of the animated creatures.
Just for fun, if dispel magic worked in this way it would be the most powerful spell in the game and here is why:
Anyone that has ever been the target of a cure wounds (or for that matter revivify, raise dead, reincarnation, resurrection, etc.) spell could potentially die outright if targeted by dispel magic since it would erase all previous curative effects in an instant.
Maybe for skeletons, but other undead probably can't be re-reanimated
It's important to note that the spells you mentioned can create undead minions out of a specific type of remains: not just any kind of corpse can be animated by these spells (you can't raise an undead dragon or minotaur with them, for example): they are specifically designed to create undead out of dead humanoids.
The spell create undead contains the following text (PHB p. 229; bold added):
Choose up to three corpses of Medium or Small humanoids within range.
The spell animate dead has a similar requirement (PHB p. 212; bold added)
Choose a pile of bones or a corpse of a Medium or Small humanoid within range.
It might not be obvious why this matters at first. It might seem that if you raised a zombie from a corpse of a humanoid, and then that zombie was destroyed, the resulting new corpse is still a dead humanoid. But a destroyed zombie or ghoul is not a humanoid corpse: it is the corpse of an undead!
As such, most destroyed undead are not valid targets of the animate dead or create undead spells.
Why might skeletons be an exception?
The text of animate dead is somewhat grammatically unclear about its possible targets. At first glance, it seems that the "pile of bones" or "corpse" must both have belonged to "a Medium or Small humanoid." But if we delete the term about the corpse, the resulting sentence:
Choose a pile of bones [...] of a Medium or Small humanoid within range.
becomes grammatically awkward. The pile is the thing being said to be "of" the humanoid, which is strange since humanoids don't contain piles of bones. If they had said "a pile of the bones of a Medium or Small humanoid", or "a pile of bones from a Medium or Small humanoid", it would have removed this grammatical awkwardness (by stressing that the bones, not the pile, are the thing once inside a humanoid). But this is not the structure of the sentence we are given.
However, there is one other way to remove this awkwardness, which is to assign the "humanoid" requirement only to the corpse, not the pile. This makes the sentence regarding the pile of bones less awkward, like so:
Choose a pile of bones [...] within range.
This is a grammatically valid reading of the original sentence, given its ambiguity (and the grammatical strangeness of the other reading). Thus, you could conclude that the bones could come from creatures other than humanoids, such as an undead.
Note that your DM may take issue with this reading. After all, it could permit you to animate a skeleton from a pile of bones from a mouse or a dragon, which is likely outside of the scope of the intended use of this spell. And since the RAW on this issue rely on an ambiguity, your DM will need to sign off on this. But if they do, you could possibly use animate dead on a destroyed skeleton to restore it to a foul semblance of life once again. After all, although the pile of bones are no longer the bones of a humanoid, they are certainly still a "pile of bones."
Sage Advice backs up these interpretations
A recent (2020) addition to the Sage Advice Compendium addresses this issue directly. It provides a question and answer on page 15 (question in bold, italics added for emphasis):
Can I cast animate dead on the humanoid-shaped corpse of an undead creature such as a zombie or a ghast? When animate dead targets a corpse, the body must have belonged to a creature of the humanoid creature type. If the spell targets a pile of bones, there is no creature type restriction; the bones become a skeleton.
Thus we have explicit RAW support for the above arguments. A pile of bones from an undead creature (such as a destroyed skeleton) can be re-reanimated, but a corpse (body, not just bones) of another formally undead creature (e.g. a zombie) cannot be re-reanimated with animate dead.
Best Answer
The 4th-level Sor/Wiz spell animate dead [necro] (Player's Handbook 198—9) says, "This spell turns the bones or bodies of dead creatures into undead skeletons or zombies that follow your spoken commands" (emphasis mine). Also, as this answer says, the spell animate dead parenthetically says, "A destroyed skeleton or zombie can’t be animated again," making it so a lone corpse can't become a zombie repeatedly, for instance, but the question of animating the remains of, for example, a ghoul or wight (ahem) remains.
When reduced to 0 hit points, the typical creature that possesses the type undead (Monster Manual 317) is destroyed. The game never properly defines destroyed, but even if the case is made that dead and destroyed are—I dunno—secretly synonyms, an animated dead creature "can be created only from a mostly intact corpse or skeleton" (199), and I suspect only the most generous DM will rule that a destroyed undead creature's form is mostly intact.
That said, if the DM does rule that a creature that possess the type undead keeps the condition dead upon its destruction and the DM rules that the creature's destruction leaves the resultant corpse largely intact and the creature wasn't previously animated via the spell animate dead, then—finally!—the animate dead spell can be used on that largely intact dead and destroyed and not-previously-animated-by-animate-dead creature… if sticking to the core rules.
Beyond the core rules (like this answer mentions), Libris Mortis on Undead Healing says
This makes it clear—outside obvious exceptions like the 5th-level Sor/Wiz spell revive undead [necro] (Spell Compendium 175—6)—that the spell animate dead can't animate a creature that possesses the type undead that's been destroyed.