147 Fun Facts About Ancient History

Which ancient civilization developed cuneiform, the wedge-shaped script that is one of the earliest writing systems?

Mesopotamia's Sumerians pressed a stylus into wet clay, at first simply to record goods and transactions; the script was later adapted for other languages and stayed in use for some 3,000 years.

Howard Carter found the nearly intact tomb of which pharaoh in the Valley of the Kings in November 1922?

Tutankhamun was a minor king with a short reign, yet his small tomb held so many treasures that Howard Carter spent the next ten years supervising their removal.

The ancient Olympic Games were held at Olympia in honour of which god?

Zeus was honoured there with the sacrifice of 100 oxen at his altar, and a sacred truce gave athletes and spectators safe passage to the games.

Which power was Rome's primary adversary in the three Punic Wars?

Carthage, a maritime power in modern Tunisia, lost all three wars; at the end of the last, in 146 BC, Rome destroyed the city and sold its 50,000 survivors into slavery.

Which dynasty is considered the first imperial dynasty of China, unifying the country in 221 BCE?

Qin Dynasty, founded by Qin Shi Huang, ran only from 221 to 206 BCE, yet the word 'China' itself may derive from its name.

Which Roman emperor ordered a 73-mile wall built across northern Britain after visiting in AD 122?

Hadrian's Wall ran from coast to coast, yet his successor all but abandoned it for a new turf wall about 100 miles further north, which was itself given up roughly twenty years later.

Which renowned Greek philosopher was a student of Plato and later tutored Alexander the Great?

Aristotle came at a price: in return for tutoring his son, King Philip II rebuilt Stagira, the philosopher's home town, which Philip's own army had destroyed, and resettled its exiled citizens.

Which French scholar announced the decipherment of Egyptian scripts in Paris in 1822, using the Rosetta Stone?

Jean-Francois Champollion had mastered half a dozen ancient languages by 16 and made himself fluent in Coptic, convinced it descended from the pharaohs' speech and held the key to the hieroglyphs.

Julius Caesar was stabbed to death by a group of senators on which date in 44 BC?

The Ides of March, 15 March: a soothsayer is said to have warned Caesar to beware the day; on his way to the Senate, the story goes, he joked that it had come, only to be told it had not yet gone.

The Great Pyramid of Giza was built as the tomb of which pharaoh?

Khufu, called Cheops by the Greeks, was long said to have used slave labour, but workers' camps found beside the site suggest the builders were Egyptian labourers, not slaves.

Mohenjo-daro and Harappa were the great cities of which Bronze Age civilisation?

The Indus Valley Civilisation built planned cities with elaborate drains and strikingly uniform brickwork, yet excavators have found no clear palaces, temples or royal monuments.

Born Gaius Octavius, who reigned as Rome's first emperor from 27 BC to AD 14?

Augustus was an honorific the Senate awarded Octavian in 27 BC; in 8 BC the month Sextilis was renamed August after him, chosen because it was the month of his first consulship and several victories.

The Bronze Age takes its name from an alloy of copper and which other metal?

Tin, typically about an eighth of the mix, makes bronze harder and more durable than copper alone, which gave bronze-working civilisations a technological edge over their neighbours.

Which museum displays the original stele bearing the Code of Hammurabi?

The Louvre has it because French excavators unearthed the stele in 1901, far from where it was made: it is thought an Elamite king carried it off as plunder some 600 years after it was carved.

Why is the Great Pyramid of Giza several metres shorter today than when it was built?

Its casing was stripped in the Middle Ages and is said to have been carted off to build nearby Cairo; the smooth white limestone had once covered the whole pyramid.

The Great Pyramid of Giza was built from an estimated how many large stone blocks?

About 2.3 million blocks went into it. Most were cut close by, but the finest white limestone came by boat from the Tura quarries, trips logged in a papyrus diary found in 2013.

The three texts on the Rosetta Stone are hieroglyphic, Ancient Greek and which other script?

Demotic, the cursive script of everyday Egyptian, is the stone's middle text; all three versions carry the same decree issued in 196 BC for Ptolemy V, which made the stone the key to decipherment.

The Rosetta Stone was found in July 1799 by an officer of which country's army?

France: an engineer officer of Napoleon's army, Pierre-Francois Bouchard, spotted the stone in an old wall at Fort Julien, but it passed into British hands when the French surrendered Egypt in 1801.

Diodorus says the dying Alexander left his empire to whom?

'To the strongest' is the deathbed answer the historian Diodorus records for Alexander the Great, aged 32; his commanders duly fought over the empire for decades.

Cleopatra's dynasty was founded by Ptolemy I, a general who came from which kingdom?

Macedon: the Ptolemies kept their Greek speech for nearly 300 years, and Cleopatra, the last of them, is the only one known to have learned the Egyptian language.

By what name is Cleopatra's eldest son, with whom she shared her throne, best known?

Caesarion, 'little Caesar', was her son by Julius Caesar; after her death Octavian had the 17-year-old killed, advised that 'too many Caesars is not good'.

Which river did Julius Caesar cross in January 49 BC to ignite civil war with the Senate?

The Rubicon marked the edge of Italy, and Roman law forbade a general to lead his army out of his province, so crossing it amounted to declaring war; the phrase still means passing the point of no return.

Which calendar, introduced in 45 BC, replaced Rome's old lunisolar calendar?

The Julian calendar is named for Julius Caesar, who first had to drag the months back into line with the seasons by making 46 BC last 445 days, the 'year of confusion'.

What larger royal research institution in Alexandria included the famous Great Library?

The Mouseion, a shrine of the Muses, housed scholars who drew a salary, free meals and tax exemption; its name comes down to us in the word 'museum'.

Which chief librarian at Alexandria was the first known person to calculate the Earth's circumference?

Eratosthenes compared the noon shadows at Alexandria with a sunlit well at Syene on midsummer's day and worked from the distance between them; rivals still nicknamed him 'Beta', second-best at everything.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, the world's oldest surviving narrative, concerns the king of which Sumerian city?

Uruk, in what is now southern Iraq, frames the whole epic: Gilgamesh sets out to win immortality, fails, and comes home to take pride instead in the great city walls he built.

The Hittite Empire, which peaked in the 14th century BC, was centred on which capital city?

Hattusa was abandoned around 1200 BC as the empire collapsed, and the Hittites were all but forgotten until the thousands of clay tablets dug up there from 1906 let scholars read their story.

The Hittites settled in the early 2nd millennium BC in the north-central part of which region?

Anatolia's Hittites left clay tablets in a language that proved, once deciphered in the 20th century, to be the earliest recorded member of the Indo-European family, a distant relative of English.

Who founded the Achaemenid Empire in 550 BC after defeating the Medes?

Cyrus the Great overthrew his Median overlord and went on to capture Babylon, where he let the exiled Jews go home; the Book of Isaiah hails him as the Lord's anointed.

In 213 BC China's first emperor notoriously ordered the mass burning of what?

Books, as the historian Sima Qian told it a century later: on his chief minister's advice works of history and philosophy were burned to silence scholars who praised the old order, sparing manuals on medicine, farming and divination.

The Terracotta Army was discovered in 1974 by local farmers who were doing what?

Digging a well in March 1974, farmer Yang Zhifa, his brothers and a neighbour struck the first figures about 1.5 km from the emperor's tomb mound, which itself has still never been excavated.

Roughly how many life-size clay soldiers are estimated to stand in the Terracotta Army's pits?

8,000 is the usual estimate, most of them still buried; each was assembled from a few standard moulded parts, then given its own face and hair so that the army looks like individuals.

Barca, the byname of Hannibal's father Hamilcar, comes from a Punic word meaning what?

Lightning, or thunderbolt, is the usual reading: Barca was probably an epithet of Hamilcar's rather than a family name, though his whole family is now known as the Barcids.

At which battle was Hannibal finally defeated, ending the Second Punic War in a Roman victory?

Zama, 202 BC: Hannibal opened with a charge of 80 war elephants, but blasts from Roman horns panicked many of them, and the victory earned Scipio the surname Africanus.

Which Roman town near Pompeii was also buried by Vesuvius in AD 79, its wood and papyrus scrolls charred but preserved?

Herculaneum was sealed under volcanic material that carbonised its wooden beds and doors, its food and its papyrus scrolls instead of destroying them; researchers now use AI to read the charred scrolls.

Which writer left a first-hand account of the eruption of Vesuvius, watched from Misenum?

Pliny the Younger described it in two letters to the historian Tacitus, including the death of his uncle Pliny the Elder, who had sailed towards the danger; such explosive eruptions are still called Plinian.

Which local betrayed the Greeks at Thermopylae by showing the Persians a path behind their lines?

Ephialtes of Trachis hoped for a great reward from Xerxes for revealing the mountain path, Herodotus says; instead the Greeks put a price on his head and he fled into exile.

Which Greek king died holding the pass at Thermopylae against the Persians in 480 BC?

Leonidas sent most of the Greek army away once the pass was turned and stayed with his 300 picked men and 700 Thespians; an oracle had reportedly warned that his city must fall or lose a king.

Which Athenian general wrote the History of the Peloponnesian War?

Thucydides was exiled for 20 years after failing to save the city of Amphipolis, which left him free to write; his history breaks off in mid-sentence in 411 BC, years before the war ended.

In legend, which twin killed his brother and went on to found Rome in 753 BC?

Romulus, in the best-known version, killed Remus for mocking and leaping over his new city wall, then filled the place with people by offering asylum to fugitives.

Which emperor began construction of the Flavian Amphitheatre, better known as the Colosseum?

Vespasian built it on the drained lake of Nero's private pleasure grounds, a gesture that handed the land back to the Roman public; his son Titus opened the arena in AD 80.

Which early Mesoamerican civilization is best known for its colossal carved stone heads?

The Olmecs, who flourished in Veracruz and Tabasco from about 1200 to 400 BC, carved 17 known colossal basalt heads, the largest over three metres tall, at sites such as San Lorenzo and La Venta.

The Bronze Age Minoan civilization, often called Europe's first, was centred on which island?

Crete's Minoans never called themselves that; the name is a modern coinage after the mythical King Minos, popularised by the excavator Arthur Evans.

The Library of Ashurbanipal's 30,000 clay tablets were found in which Assyrian capital?

Nineveh's library survived because the city burned: the fire that destroyed the palace baked the clay tablets hard, preserving them until excavators found them more than 2,000 years later.

Which seafaring people's script gave rise to the Greek alphabet, and through it Latin and Cyrillic?

The Phoenicians wrote only consonants; the Greeks took letters for sounds their own language lacked and reused them as vowels, so aleph, 'ox', became alpha.

Emperor Ashoka embraced Buddhist 'dhamma' after the brutal conquest of which region around 260 BC?

Kalinga, on India's east coast in modern Odisha, cost so many lives that Ashoka recorded his remorse in stone: his 13th Rock Edict counts 100,000 killed and 150,000 deported.

Athens lost an entire fleet and army in 413 BC after a disastrous expedition to which island?

Sicily: Athens sent a huge armada to conquer the island and lost nearly all of it, its men killed, captured or sold into slavery, a blow from which the city never fully recovered.

Göbekli Tepe, home to some of the world's oldest megaliths, is in which modern country?

Turkey: Gobekli Tepe, 'Potbelly Hill', was raised more than 11,000 years ago by hunter-gatherers who had no pottery, long before the first cities or the pyramids.

Which ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid kings did Alexander the Great's army burn in 330 BC?

Persepolis was set alight during a drunken feast, in one account at the urging of Thais, an Athenian courtesan; another calls it deliberate revenge for the Persian burning of Athens.

At which battle in 490 BC did Athenian hoplites rout the first Persian invasion of Greece?

Marathon: the legend of a runner carrying news of the victory all the way to Athens gave its name to the modern long-distance run.

Hatshepsut's famous trading expedition, which brought back 31 myrrh trees, went where?

Punt, most likely on or near the Horn of Africa, sent Hatshepsut's ships home with living myrrh trees, which were planted at her temple.

What is the modern name of Akhetaten, the capital Akhenaten built for the Aten?

Amarna was abandoned soon after Akhenaten's death; a later pharaoh, Horemheb, had the city razed and its stone reused, part of a campaign to erase the heretic king's memory.

A replica of the Egyptian-Hittite treaty that followed the Battle of Kadesh hangs where?

United Nations headquarters hangs a copper replica near the Security Council chamber; the original pact ended the two empires' wars over Syria and pledged each king to help the other.

Which king, shown on a famous palette wearing two different crowns, is widely credited with first unifying Egypt?

Narmer may be the Menes of Egyptian tradition, founder of the First Dynasty; the ancient historian Manetho claimed Menes reigned for decades before being killed by a hippopotamus.

Sargon the Great, often called history's first emperor, ruled which empire?

The Akkadian Empire was Sargon's creation, uniting the Sumerian city-states under one ruler; a later legend has him set adrift in a basket as a baby and raised to be a gardener.

Which Babylonian king built the Ishtar Gate and rebuilt the Etemenanki ziggurat?

Nebuchadnezzar II's blue-glazed gate now stands rebuilt in a Berlin museum, and some scholars think his towering ziggurat lies behind the Bible's story of the Tower of Babel.

The trilingual Behistun inscription is carved on a cliff in which modern country?

Iran: carved 100 metres up a cliff near Kermanshah, its three parallel texts did for cuneiform what the Rosetta Stone did for hieroglyphs, once Henry Rawlinson had copied them in the 19th century.

Which Athenian general masterminded the Greek naval victory over Xerxes at Salamis in 480 BC?

Themistocles lured Xerxes' fleet into the narrow straits, where its numbers became a liability; later ostracised by Athens, he ended his days as a governor in Persian service.

Sentenced to death in 399 BC, Socrates carried out his own execution by drinking what?

Hemlock: Plato's Phaedo has Socrates drink it calmly among his friends, and gives his last words as a reminder to Crito that they owed a cock to Asclepius, the god of healing.

Which city-state forced Athens to surrender in 404 BC, ending the Peloponnesian War?

Sparta starved Athens into surrender, yet refused its allies' demand to destroy the city, saying it would not enslave Greeks who had done such service when Greece was in danger.

Which Persian king did Alexander the Great crush at Gaugamela in 331 BC?

Darius III fled the field at Gaugamela, near modern Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan, and was murdered in 330 BC by his own satrap Bessus; the Achaemenid Empire effectively ended with him.

Alexander the Great founded the city of Bucephala on his Indian campaign in honour of whom or what?

His horse Bucephalus had carried him since boyhood, when he tamed the unruly stallion by turning it away from its own shadow; it died after his last great battle, in what is now Pakistan.

Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier in 212 BC during the sack of which Sicilian city?

Syracuse fell to Marcus Claudius Marcellus in 212 BC after a two-year siege in which Archimedes' war machines held the Romans off; Marcellus had ordered the mathematician spared, but a soldier killed him.

At the first recorded Olympic Games in 776 BC, what was the only event?

A foot race: the stadion, a single sprint of about 190 metres, was the only contest at the earliest Games, and each four-year Olympiad was later named after its winner.

After expelling its last king in 509 BC, Rome became what kind of state?

A republic: by tradition Lucius Junius Brutus made the people swear never again to tolerate a king, a story modern scholars doubt, and his reputed descendant Marcus Brutus helped assassinate Julius Caesar centuries later.

Which wealthy Roman finally crushed Spartacus's revolt in the Third Servile War?

Crassus, Rome's richest man, broke Spartacus's army in 71 BC and had 6,000 captured rebels crucified along the Appian Way; Pompey, arriving late, claimed credit for finishing the war.

Who commanded Octavian's fleet against Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 BC?

Agrippa, Octavian's lifelong friend, commanded the fleet that penned the enemy in at Actium; when Cleopatra's squadron broke away for the open sea, Antony abandoned the fight to follow her.

Which emperor, according to Suetonius, planned to make his racehorse Incitatus a consul?

Caligula, emperor AD 37-41, gave Incitatus a marble stable and ivory manger, Suetonius says; the consulship never actually happened and may have been a jibe at the Senate.

After Rome's Great Fire of AD 64, Nero used the cleared land to build which vast palace?

The Golden House, or Domus Aurea, was later buried under other buildings; Renaissance artists who climbed down into its painted rooms, which they took for grottoes, gave us the word 'grotesque'.

Which emperor won the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in AD 312?

Constantine's rival Maxentius drowned in the Tiber during the rout; the victor credited the Christian God, and the next year he agreed the Edict of Milan, which let Christians worship freely.

Which barbarian general deposed the last Western Roman emperor, a young boy, in 476?

Odoacer, a Germanic officer in the Roman army, spared the boy emperor and sent him to live in Campania, then ruled Italy himself with the title of king rather than emperor.

Which people, led by King Alaric, sacked Rome on 24 August 410?

The Visigoths entered by the Salarian Gate, the first time in almost 800 years that Rome had fallen to a foreign enemy; Jerome wrote that 'the city which had taken the whole world was itself taken'.

Boudica, who led a revolt against Rome in AD 60 or 61, was queen of which British tribe?

The Iceni of modern Norfolk rose after Rome seized their kingdom on King Prasutagus' death; Boudica's forces burned Camulodunum, Londinium and Verulamium before the governor Suetonius Paulinus destroyed them.

Which Gallic chieftain surrendered to Caesar after the siege of Alesia in 52 BC?

Vercingetorix, who had united the Gallic tribes against Rome, was held in prison for six years, then paraded through the streets in Caesar's triumph and executed.

Who led the Germanic ambush that wiped out three Roman legions at Teutoburg Forest?

Arminius, a Cheruscan prince with Roman citizenship, led his own commander into the trap; the emperor reportedly beat his head on a door, crying 'Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!'

The hilltop fortress of Masada fell to Rome around AD 73 at the end of which conflict?

The First Jewish–Roman War ended at Masada, where the Tenth Legion built a huge siege ramp; Josephus says 960 defenders took their own lives rather than be captured.

Which Roman orator conferred on Herodotus the title 'The Father of History'?

Cicero gave Herodotus the title pater historiae in his De Legibus; Plutarch, less impressed, wrote an essay titled On the Malice of Herodotus attacking his bias.

The Code of Ur-Nammu, the oldest surviving law code, punished most bodily injuries with what?

Fines in silver were its usual remedy for bodily harm; the harsher rule of an eye for an eye appears only centuries later, in the laws of Babylon.

Meroë, famed for its fields of steep-sided pyramids, was for centuries the capital of which kingdom?

Kush, in what is now Sudan, had earlier turned the tables on its old overlord: its kings ruled Egypt as the pharaohs of the 25th Dynasty before the capital moved south to Meroe.

The Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders, depicted which Greek god?

Helios, the sun god and patron of Rhodes: the islanders paid for the bronze giant, over 30 metres tall, by selling the siege engines a defeated invader left behind, and an earthquake felled it in 226 BC.

In which city did the Temple of Artemis that Herostratus burned in 356 BC stand?

Ephesus, on the Ionian coast near modern Selcuk, held the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders; the city banned mention of Herostratus' name, and the fire reportedly fell on the night Alexander was born.

Ötzi the Iceman was found in the Alps on the border between Italy and which country?

Austria: found by two German hikers in 1991, he was first taken to Innsbruck, until a survey showed the spot lay 92 metres inside Italy; an arrowhead in his shoulder suggests he was killed.

Which mentor-turned-minister helped Chandragupta Maurya found the Maurya Empire?

Chanakya, legend says, was insulted at the court of the Nanda king and vowed to destroy him, then groomed the young Chandragupta to overthrow the dynasty and take its throne.

The largest pyramid at Teotihuacan in Mexico is named for what?

The Sun: the names of the city and its pyramids come from the Aztecs, who arrived centuries after Teotihuacan was abandoned; what its own builders called them is unknown.

Which archaeologist unearthed the Standard of Ur in the city's Royal Cemetery in the 1920s?

Leonard Woolley's finds in the royal tombs inspired one of Agatha Christie's murder mysteries; she went on to marry his young assistant, Max Mallowan.

Which self-taught linguist and architect deciphered the Mycenaean script Linear B in 1952?

Michael Ventris was a 14-year-old schoolboy when he heard Arthur Evans talk about the unread tablets in 1936; sixteen years later he showed that the script recorded an early form of Greek.

In legend, Queen Dido fled which Phoenician city before founding a new one in North Africa?

Tyre: Dido, sister of its king Pygmalion, fled after he murdered her husband; she supposedly bought only as much African land as an ox-hide could cover, then cut the hide into strips to enclose the Byrsa hill.

The term 'Pyrrhic victory' comes from a king of which Greek kingdom who fought Rome?

Epirus, in north-west Greece, was ruled by Pyrrhus, who beat Rome at Heraclea in 280 BC and Asculum in 279 BC at such cost that he reportedly said one more such victory would ruin him.

Found in the ruins of Babylon in 1879, the Cyrus Cylinder is held by which institution?

The British Museum holds it because its own excavator, Hormuzd Rassam, dug it up in 1879; the clay cylinder gives the king's account of how he took Babylon in 539 BC and restored its temples.

Croesus, credited with the first standardised gold coins, was the last king of where?

Lydia fell, as Herodotus tells it, after Croesus asked the oracle at Delphi about going to war and heard that he would destroy a great empire; he misread the answer, and the empire that fell was his own.

Most Egyptologists credit which vizier with designing Djoser's Step Pyramid at Saqqara?

Imhotep was a real official of King Djoser, yet in the centuries after his death he was glorified and finally worshipped as a god of wisdom and medicine, a rare fate for a commoner.

What is at the centre of the dome of Rome's Pantheon?

An open hole, the oculus, has no covering, so it lets in rain as well as the daylight that lights the interior; the dome is a perfect hemisphere, as high from the floor as it is wide.

Petra, the rock-cut city in southern Jordan, was built by which nomadic Arab people?

The Nabataeans, Arab traders who settled Petra by the 4th century BC, grew rich controlling the incense route from southern Arabia; they called the city Raqmu, and Rome annexed their kingdom in AD 106.

Zenobia, who defied Rome in the 3rd century, was queen of which empire based in Syria?

The Palmyrene Empire, ruled by Zenobia from the oasis city of Palmyra, took Egypt and much of Asia Minor before Aurelian crushed it in 272; tradition has her paraded in gold chains and retired to a villa near Tivoli.

Oracle bones, carrying the earliest major body of Chinese writing, date to which dynasty?

The Shang dynasty's diviners heated ox shoulder blades and turtle shells and read the cracks; the bones were long known as medicinal 'dragon bones' before a scholar recognised the writing on them in 1899.

The best-known Vindolanda tablet, written around AD 100 by Claudia Severa, is what?

A birthday invitation: Claudia Severa asked Sulpicia Lepidina, the fort commander's wife, to her birthday on 11 September, adding a greeting in her own hand, perhaps the oldest surviving Latin written by a woman.

One theory says China's first emperor died from an immortality elixir containing which metal?

Mercury pills, prescribed by court alchemists as an elixir of life, are the suspected cause of his death in 210 BC; Sima Qian says his tomb holds rivers of mercury, and soil tests there show unusually high levels.

Which river's yearly flood left the fertile black soil that gave ancient Egypt its own name, Kemet?

The Nile flooded so reliably that Egyptians built their year around it, in three seasons: Inundation, Growth and Harvest.

In Rome's founding legend, which animal nursed the abandoned twins Romulus and Remus in a cave?

A she-wolf suckling the twins became the symbol of Rome itself, and the cave where she was said to have cared for them, the Lupercal, was treated as a holy site.

In Egyptian belief, a person's heart was weighed after death against which object belonging to the goddess Maat?

A feather decided everything: a heart found unworthy was devoured by Ammit, a goddess with a crocodile's head, a lion's forequarters and a hippopotamus's hindquarters.

Which marsh plant did ancient Egyptians slice into strips, layer crosswise and press into sheets for writing?

Papyrus was Egypt's all-purpose plant: besides writing sheets, its stems went into boats, mats, rope, sandals and baskets.

Which prehistoric monument on England's Salisbury Plain includes bluestones hauled about 150 miles from Wales?

Stonehenge went up in phases over at least 1,500 years, and because its builders left no written records, its purpose is still argued over.

Which system of government took shape in Athens after Cleisthenes broke the power of the noble families?

Democracy in Athens was far from universal: only adult, free male citizens could take part, which shut out women, slaves and resident foreigners.

Which Roman emperor ordered a 73-mile wall built across northern Britain to separate Romans from barbarians?

Hadrian spent more than half his reign outside Italy touring the provinces, and he abandoned his predecessor's conquests in the east.

Which trade network, begun when Han China pushed into Central Asia, got its modern name from a German geographer?

Silk Road traders rarely travelled its whole length: goods passed through a chain of middlemen based at stopping points along the way.

Which poet, blind according to most ancient biographies, is credited with both the Iliad and the Odyssey?

Homer may not have been one person: most researchers believe the poems were first passed on orally, and scholars generally think the two had separate authors.

Which Chinese teacher's sayings were compiled by later followers into the Analects, long after his death?

Confucius called himself a transmitter who invented nothing, yet under Emperor Wu of Han his ideas became required reading for would-be officials.

Bronze, the metal that names a whole age of ancient history, is copper alloyed mainly with which scarce metal?

Tin was so rare that it usually had to be traded over very long distances, which tied Bronze Age cultures to far-off mines.

Which senator, whose mother Servilia was Julius Caesar's mistress, became the most famous of Caesar's assassins?

Brutus traced his family back to the man who expelled Rome's last king, and as opinion soured on Caesar, Romans jeered that he was failing to live up to his ancestors.

Which Athenian temple was blown apart when a Venetian bomb hit the gunpowder Ottoman troops had stored inside?

The Parthenon had already been converted into a Christian church and then, after the Ottoman conquest of the 15th century, into a mosque.

Which Giza monument did the young Thutmose IV dig out of the drifting sand, marking the work with his Dream Stele?

The Great Sphinx was buried up to its shoulders by drifting sand after the Giza cemeteries were abandoned, and it had to be cleared again in Roman times.

Which philosopher from Samos, founder of a secretive school in southern Italy, has a triangle theorem named after him?

Pythagoras left no authentic writings, and the rule behind his theorem was already in use in Babylonian mathematics long before he was born.

Which invader, nicknamed the Scourge of God, agreed to withdraw from Italy after meeting Pope Leo I?

Attila died within a year: in the usual account he suffered severe bleeding at a feast for his latest marriage, and his Hunnic Empire quickly collapsed.

Which legendary city did Heinrich Schliemann claim to have found by cutting a trench into the mound at Hisarlik?

Troy proved to be nine cities, each built on the ruins of the last, and later archaeologists condemned Schliemann's excavations for destroying key layers.

Which civilization built the rainforest city of Tikal and dated its monuments with the Long Count calendar?

The Maya created the most sophisticated writing system in the pre-Columbian Americas and used one of the earliest known symbols for zero.

Which river flows past the city of Rome and once reached the coast at the ancient port of Ostia?

The Tiber has pushed its mouth out by about 3 km since Roman times, leaving the old port of Ostia Antica stranded well inland.

Which pharaoh, who reigned for 66 years, fought the Hittites at Kadesh and later signed a peace treaty with them?

Ramesses II led at least 15 military campaigns, and Kadesh, generally considered a stalemate, was the only one that did not end in victory.

Which pair of rock-cut Egyptian temples was moved to higher ground in 1968 to escape the waters of Lake Nasser?

Abu Simbel was rebuilt at the same angle, so that dawn light still reaches the innermost sanctum on two mornings each year.

Whose painted bust, found in a sculptor's workshop in 1912, is displayed in the Neues Museum in Berlin?

Nefertiti's bust has been argued over since 1924, when it first went on public display and Egypt began demanding its return from Germany.

Which Athenian statesman led the city through its Golden Age before dying in the plague of 429 BC?

Pericles brought in generous wages for citizens who served as jurymen, and let the poor watch plays at the state's expense.

Which Chinese general is traditionally credited with The Art of War, a strategy text from the Warring States period?

Sun Tzu may not have written all of it: the earliest parts of the work probably date to at least a century after his lifetime.

Which collection of ancient manuscripts was first found by Bedouin shepherds in caves at Qumran in the 1940s?

The Dead Sea Scrolls include the oldest surviving manuscripts of entire books of the Bible, copied out between the 3rd century BCE and the 1st century CE.

Which Roman road, begun in 312 BC and praised as the queen of long roads, linked Rome to Brindisi?

The Via Appia, or Appian Way, became a grim landmark in 71 BC, when 6,000 captured slaves from the army of Spartacus were crucified along it.

Which Roman chariot-racing stadium could hold about 150,000 spectators and survives today as a public park?

The Circus Maximus is where the great fire of AD 64 broke out, sweeping through its stands and shops before destroying much of the city.

Which emperor, born in Spain and honoured by a spiral column in Rome, ruled the Roman Empire at its greatest extent?

Trajan's conquest of Dacia, the war carved around his column, won Rome the region's gold mines and boosted the empire's finances.

At which sanctuary on the slopes of Mount Parnassus did a priestess called the Pythia give her famous prophecies?

Delphi was held to be the centre of the world, a spot marked by a stone monument called the Omphalos, meaning navel.

Which old colony on the Bosphorus did Emperor Constantine refound in AD 330 as Nova Roma, his new imperial seat?

Byzantium lent its name to the Byzantine Empire only after that empire had fallen; its own citizens called themselves Romans to the end.

Which Germanic people built a kingdom in Roman North Africa and sailed from there to sack Rome in 455?

The Vandals looted Rome for two weeks, a rampage that later writers turned into the word vandalism for any wanton destruction.

Which people of ancient Italy formed a federation of city-states across what is now Tuscany before Rome's rise?

The Etruscans left around 13,000 inscriptions that scholars can pronounce, yet much of their meaning is still not understood.

In which tightly packed formation did hoplites of Athens and Thebes lock shields and project spears over the front rank?

The phalanx had a built-in weak spot: the men at its extreme right were only half-protected, so enemies tried to overlap that flank.

Which Cynic philosopher is said to have sheltered in a large clay storage tub and carried a lit lamp in daylight?

Diogenes is said to have sheltered in his tub, properly a pithos meant for storing food, during winters in Athens and to have spent his summers outdoors in Corinth.

Which everyday material is the Han court official Cai Lun traditionally said to have invented in 105 CE?

Paper already existed in cruder forms, but Cai Lun's recipe of tree bark, hemp waste, old rags and fishnets made large-scale manufacture possible.

Which culture of southern Peru etched a giant hummingbird, monkey and spider into the desert floor?

The Nazca also dug puquios, underground aqueducts for their arid homeland, and several dozen of them still carry water today.

In Egyptian mummification, which vessels held the embalmed lungs, liver, stomach and intestines taken from the body?

Canopic jars were never made for the heart, which stayed in the body because Egyptians believed it to be the seat of the soul.

Which mathematician, who spent his career in Alexandria around 300 BC, wrote the geometry treatise called the Elements?

Euclid's treatise is often called the most successful textbook ever written, and its geometry dominated the field until the early 19th century.

Which jackal-headed Egyptian god was both an embalmer and a protector of graves and cemeteries?

Anubis owes his head to real jackals, scavengers that dug up bodies from shallow graves and so became linked with cemeteries.

What title did the governors of the Achaemenid Empire's provinces hold, later borrowed by Hellenistic kingdoms?

A satrap was watched by the eye of the king, a royal emissary who made an annual inspection of the province.

What name did Herodotus give the Achaemenid army's elite heavy infantry, a corps kept at exactly 10,000 men?

The Immortals earned the name because every man killed, badly wounded or taken sick was replaced at once, so the corps never seemed to shrink.

Which chief librarian at Alexandria first calculated the Earth's circumference by comparing shadows in two cities?

Eratosthenes also coined the words geography and geographer, launching a discipline that did not exist when he was a student.

By which Athenian procedure could citizens vote, on broken pottery, to banish a public figure for ten years?

Ostracism takes its name from the ostraka, the pottery sherds used as voting tokens, and its victims could come home afterwards without stigma.

Which Roman was appointed dictator in an emergency, won a swift victory, then gave up power and returned to his farm?

Cincinnatus held near-absolute power for little more than two weeks, and his prompt resignation made him a lasting model of civic virtue.

Which emperor set up the Tetrarchy, the rule of four, then abdicated in 305 and retired to grow vegetables in Dalmatia?

Diocletian, urged to take back the throne, replied that nobody who saw the cabbages he had planted with his own hands would ask.

Which Bronze Age palace, excavated by Arthur Evans from 1900, was remembered in later tradition as the Labyrinth?

Knossos is widely considered Europe's oldest city, and its myths take in King Minos, the Minotaur and the inventor Daedalus.

What name was given to the subjugated farmers who formed most of the population of the lands ruled by Sparta?

Helots lived under a yearly threat: every autumn Sparta declared war on them, so that killing one carried no religious guilt.

Which foreign dynasty ruled northern Egypt from Avaris and is credited with introducing the chariot and composite bow?

The Hyksos were finally defeated by Ahmose I, the pharaoh who went on to found Egypt's Eighteenth Dynasty.

Which African kingdom raised giant obelisks over its rulers' tombs and adopted Christianity under King Ezana?

Aksum was named by the prophet Mani as one of the four great powers of the 3rd-century world, in the company of Rome and China.

Which Roman army officer, picked out by a side-to-side helmet crest, carried a vine staff as his badge of authority?

Centurions used the vine staff for more than show: it enforced discipline, and was used to beat any soldier trying to flee.