Ancient Near East
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
50 free Ancient Near East trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The ancient Near East is where much of everyday life began: the first cities, the first written records, the first law codes and the first empires all appeared between the Nile and the mountains of Iran. For three thousand years its powers traded, married, spied on and conquered one another, and the stories they left behind shaped the Bible and the Greek historians alike. This quiz covers the whole region and its chronology. You will meet the city-states of Sumer, the Babylonian and Assyrian empires, Egypt's dealings with its neighbours, the powers of Anatolia and the Levant, and the Persian kings who finally ruled them all. Questions ask who built what, who defeated whom and which age or dynasty came next, alongside the inventions, gods and trade goods that tied the region together. It is written for students revising a world history or ancient civilisations unit, for teachers who want a ready-made review, and for anyone who enjoys a good archaeology story. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you can play straight through or print the set for a class.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which drink is praised in the Sumerian Hymn to Ninkasi, a poem about 3,900 years old that doubles as a recipe?
Beer
Beer in the hymn is usually read as brewed from a bread that is soaked and left to ferment, making it the oldest surviving recipe for the drink. Ninkasi was the Sumerian goddess of brewing.
Q 02Which of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World is the only one whose site has never been definitively located?
Hanging Gardens
The Hanging Gardens appear in no surviving Babylonian text, and digging at Babylon has found no sure trace of them. One theory places them at an Assyrian palace instead.
Q 03Which Babylonian king had 282 laws carved on a basalt stele that now stands in the Louvre in Paris?
Hammurabi
Hammurabi's stele spent centuries as war loot: it was carried off to Susa, in modern Iran, about 600 years after it was carved, and was dug up there in 1901.
Q 04What name did the Greek historian Herodotus give to the Persian kings' elite corps of exactly 10,000 infantry?
The Immortals
The Immortals seemed never to die because every man killed or taken sick was replaced at once, keeping the corps at full strength. Herodotus says they carried wicker shields and short spears.
Q 05Which number system did Babylonian scribes inherit from Sumer, one that survives in how hours and circles are divided?
Base 60
Base 60 suited the scribes because sixty divides evenly by every number from one to six, which keeps fractions simple. It is why a minute has sixty seconds.
Q 06Which legendary Sumerian king is the hero of an epic, recovered on clay tablets, with a flood story like Noah's?
Gilgamesh
Gilgamesh was probably a real king who was later worshipped as a god, and the epic about him is the world's oldest surviving work of narrative literature.
Q 07Which king of Phrygia, apparently the Mita of Assyrian records, shares his name with the Greek myth of the golden touch?
Midas
Midas was the name of a real ruler of the late 8th century BC who fought Assyria over its provinces in Anatolia. Greek storytellers tied the name to a king who turned whatever he touched to gold.
Q 08Which seafaring people of Tyre and Sidon devised the 22-letter alphabet that the Greeks adapted for their own?
Phoenicians
Phoenicians wrote only consonants and left the reader to supply the vowels. The Greeks who borrowed the script added vowel letters to fit their own language.
Q 09Which Persian king captured Babylon in 539 BC and, in the Bible, let the exiled Jews return home to Jerusalem?
Cyrus the Great
Cyrus the Great is the only non-Jew the Bible calls a messiah, an anointed one, a title the Book of Isaiah gives him for ending the exile. He also founded the Achaemenid Empire.
Q 10Which Sumerian city, often identified with Abraham's birthplace in Genesis, held the Royal Tombs dug by Leonard Woolley?
Ur
Ur was dug from 1922 to 1934 for the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania. Queen Puabi's tomb there survived almost intact, with her jewellery of gold, silver, carnelian and agate.
Q 11Which script, pressed into wet clay with a reed stylus, is last seen on an astronomical tablet of about AD 80?
Cuneiform
Cuneiform is the earliest known writing system, devised for Sumerian and then adapted for many other languages. Its signs are built from the wedge-shaped dents that give the script its name.
Q 12Which inscribed slab, found by French soldiers in Egypt in 1799, gave Champollion the key to reading hieroglyphs?
Rosetta Stone
The Rosetta Stone repeats one decree of 196 BC three times, in hieroglyphs, in Demotic and in Greek, so scholars who could read the Greek had a crib for the other two.
Q 13Which Babylonian king destroyed Jerusalem in 587 BC and carried much of Judah's population into exile?
Nebuchadnezzar II
Q 21Which lingua franca of the Assyrian kings displaced their own language and was later spoken by Jesus?
Aramaic
Aramaic was made the Assyrian empire's second official language by Tiglath-Pileser III. The Persian kings kept it on, and it became the common tongue of public life and trade across their lands.
Q 22Which people of Gaza, Ashkelon and Ashdod appear in the Bible as the foes of Samson, Saul and David?
Philistines
Philistines were organised as a league of five cities, with Ekron and Gath completing the set. Their champion Goliath fell to David in single combat.
Q 23Which archaeological age began in the Near East in the 12th century BC and ends with the rise of Persia?
Iron Age
Nebuchadnezzar II reigned for 43 years, the longest of his dynasty. The Book of Daniel has him lose his mind and live like an animal for seven years.
Q 14Which Persian king crossed the Hellespont on bridges of boats in 480 BC and beat the Spartans at Thermopylae?
Xerxes I
Xerxes I had the sea itself whipped 300 times after a storm wrecked his first bridges, or so Herodotus tells it. A second pair held, and his army marched into Europe.
Q 15Which river flowed through the middle of ancient Babylon and, with the Tigris, encloses the plain of Mesopotamia?
Euphrates
The Euphrates is the longest river in western Asia, at about 2,780 km. Babylon stood on its lower course, some 85 km south of where Baghdad is now.
Q 16Which name did James Henry Breasted popularise in 1914 for the lands running from the Levant to the Persian Gulf?
Fertile Crescent
The Fertile Crescent is believed to be the first place where people settled down to farm, clearing land to raise newly domesticated plants as crops.
Q 17Which West Bank city already had a stone wall and a tower with an inner staircase about 10,000 years ago?
Jericho
Jericho's tower stands over 8.5 metres high with 22 stone steps inside. The wall beside it may have been raised to hold back floodwater, not armies.
Q 18Which astrological system began when Babylonian astronomers split the Sun's yearly path into twelve equal parts?
The zodiac
The zodiac has drifted since it was drawn up: because Earth's axis slowly wobbles, the Sun no longer sits in the same constellations on the same dates as it did in Babylonian times.
Q 19Which Mesopotamian unit of weight for silver later became a coin and gave modern Israel's currency its name?
Shekel
Shekel comes from a Semitic root meaning to weigh, a reminder that it was a measure on the scales long before it was a coin.
Q 20Which salt-tolerant grain did Sumerian farmers turn to in place of wheat and use, alongside silver, as currency?
Barley
Barley took over as centuries of irrigation left salt in the fields of southern Mesopotamia, which wheat tolerates poorly. A Sumerian debt could be repaid in grain or in silver.
The Iron Age opened as the palace states of the Late Bronze Age collapsed. Historians of the Near East traditionally close it with the founding of the Achaemenid Empire around 550 BC.
Q 24Which Mediterranean island, the copper-exporting Alashiya of Near Eastern records, gave the metal its Latin name?
Cyprus
Cyprus shipped copper by the tonne: one royal letter apologises for sending only 500 talents, about 12.5 tonnes. The Romans called the metal aes cyprium, which was later worn down to cuprum.
Q 25Which colour of dye, made from sea snails at the Levantine port of Tyre, was said to fetch its weight in silver?
Purple
Purple from Tyre took tens of thousands of murex snails and a great deal of labour to make, so only the rich could wear it. Roman generals later put it on to celebrate a triumph.
Q 26Which type of stepped temple tower, built across Mesopotamia, do scholars link to the Bible's Tower of Babel?
Ziggurat
Ziggurat builders at Babylon named theirs Etemenanki, the house of the foundation of heaven and earth. It no longer stands, but it is the likeliest model for the Babel story.
Q 27Which Iranian prophet preached the Wise Lord Ahura Mazda and a struggle between truth and deception?
Zoroaster
Zoroaster's teaching became the religion of the Persian kings and remained the official creed of Iranian empires for roughly a thousand years.
Q 28Which people ruled central Anatolia from Hattusa and spoke the oldest Indo-European language known from written records?
Hittites
Hittites took the name of their land, Hatti, from an older people of the region whose language was unrelated to their own. Deciphering their tablets was a landmark in the study of Indo-European languages.
Q 29Which ruler, said in legend to have been set adrift on a river as a baby like Moses, founded Mesopotamia's first empire?
Sargon of Akkad
Sargon of Akkad is said to have begun as cup-bearer to the king of Kish before taking a throne of his own. He went on to conquer the Sumerian city-states one after another.
Q 30In which Assyrian capital did King Ashurbanipal assemble a library of about 30,000 clay tablets and writing boards?
Nineveh
Nineveh's library survived because it burned: when the palace was sacked, the fire baked many of the clay tablets hard. Among them was the Babylonian creation story Enuma Elish.