Ancient History
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147 free Ancient History trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
12 free Ancient History trivia questions with answers. Explore the depths of human civilization with our Ancient History trivia quiz. Whether you're a history buff or casual learner, these 147 questions will test your knowledge of iconic empires, legendary figures, and pivotal moments that shaped our world. Take the quiz now and discover how much you really know about history's greatest achievements.
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Q 01Which ancient civilization developed cuneiform, the wedge-shaped script that is one of the earliest writing systems?
Mesopotamia
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.
Q 02Howard Carter found the nearly intact tomb of which pharaoh in the Valley of the Kings in November 1922?
Tutankhamun
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.
Q 03The ancient Olympic Games were held at Olympia in honour of which god?
Zeus
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.
Q 04Which power was Rome's primary adversary in the three Punic Wars?
Carthage
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.
Q 05Which dynasty is considered the first imperial dynasty of China, unifying the country in 221 BCE?
Qin Dynasty
Qin Dynasty, founded by Qin Shi Huang, ran only from 221 to 206 BCE, yet the word 'China' itself may derive from its name.
Q 06Which Roman emperor ordered a 73-mile wall built across northern Britain after visiting in AD 122?
Hadrian
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.
Q 07Which renowned Greek philosopher was a student of Plato and later tutored Alexander the Great?
Aristotle
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.
Q 08Which French scholar announced the decipherment of Egyptian scripts in Paris in 1822, using the Rosetta Stone?
Jean-Francois Champollion
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.
Q 09Julius Caesar was stabbed to death by a group of senators on which date in 44 BC?
The Ides of March
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.
Q 10The Great Pyramid of Giza was built as the tomb of which pharaoh?
Khufu
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.
Q 11Mohenjo-daro and Harappa were the great cities of which Bronze Age civilisation?
The Indus Valley 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.
Q 12Born Gaius Octavius, who reigned as Rome's first emperor from 27 BC to AD 14?
Augustus
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.
Q 13The Bronze Age takes its name from an alloy of copper and which other metal?
Tin
Q 21By what name is Cleopatra's eldest son, with whom she shared her throne, best known?
Caesarion
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'.
Q 22Which river did Julius Caesar cross in January 49 BC to ignite civil war with the Senate?
The Rubicon
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.
Q 23Which calendar, introduced in 45 BC, replaced Rome's old lunisolar calendar?
Julian
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.
Q 14Which museum displays the original stele bearing the Code of Hammurabi?
The Louvre
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.
Q 15Why is the Great Pyramid of Giza several metres shorter today than when it was built?
Its casing was stripped
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.
Q 16The Great Pyramid of Giza was built from an estimated how many large stone blocks?
2.3 million
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.
Q 17The three texts on the Rosetta Stone are hieroglyphic, Ancient Greek and which other script?
Demotic
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.
Q 18The Rosetta Stone was found in July 1799 by an officer of which country's army?
France
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.
Q 19Diodorus says the dying Alexander left his empire to whom?
The strongest
'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.
Q 20Cleopatra's dynasty was founded by Ptolemy I, a general who came from which kingdom?
Macedon
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.
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'.
Q 24What larger royal research institution in Alexandria included the famous Great Library?
The Mouseion
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'.
Q 25Which chief librarian at Alexandria was the first known person to calculate the Earth's circumference?
Eratosthenes
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.
Q 26The Epic of Gilgamesh, the world's oldest surviving narrative, concerns the king of which Sumerian city?
Uruk
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.
Q 27The Hittite Empire, which peaked in the 14th century BC, was centred on which capital city?
Hattusa
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.
Q 28The Hittites settled in the early 2nd millennium BC in the north-central part of which region?
Anatolia
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.
Q 29Who founded the Achaemenid Empire in 550 BC after defeating the Medes?
Cyrus the Great
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.
Q 30In 213 BC China's first emperor notoriously ordered the mass burning of what?
Books
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.