Assyrian Empire
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50 free Assyrian Empire trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
For about three hundred years the Assyrian Empire was the superpower of the ancient Near East. Its kings ruled from the Persian Gulf to the Nile, ran the fastest postal service of the age and filled their palaces with some of the finest stone carving ever made. Then, within a single generation, it was gone. This quiz covers the whole story: the merchant city where it began, the warrior kings and their campaigns, the capitals and their libraries, the gods, demons and omens that ruled daily life, the clashes recorded in the Bible, and the fall that ended it all. It also follows the Victorian excavators who dug the palaces out again and the Assyrian people who still keep the name alive. The questions start with the famous stories and work up to deeper cuts, so the quiz suits students revising ancient Mesopotamia, teachers and quiz hosts who need a ready-made round, and anyone who has stood before the great museum reliefs and wondered who made them. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which animals were released from cages into an arena for Assyrian kings to kill with arrows, spears or swords?
Lions
Lions had been reserved for royalty to kill for over a thousand years in Mesopotamia, and carvings of the staged hunts now fill a room at the British Museum.
Q 02To which Assyrian capital does the Bible's Book of Jonah send its reluctant prophet to preach?
Nineveh
Nineveh was the largest city in the world for about fifty years, and a shrine to the prophet stood on one of its ruin mounds until 2014.
Q 03Which ancient epic, famous for its flood story, was pieced together from tablets found in an Assyrian royal library?
Gilgamesh
Gilgamesh caused a sensation in 1872, when George Smith translated its flood tablet and a London newspaper paid for him to go and hunt for the missing pieces.
Q 04Which Wonder of the Ancient World may really have been built by an Assyrian king, scholar Stephanie Dalley argues?
Hanging Gardens
The Hanging Gardens have left no trace at Babylon, and Dalley's theory moves them north to a palace fed by an 80-kilometre chain of canals and aqueducts.
Q 05Which modern country holds the ruins of all four great Assyrian capitals, one of them inside the city of Mosul?
Iraq
Iraq's Assyrian sites sit close together: a second capital lies just 30 kilometres south of Mosul, and a third only 15 kilometres to its northeast.
Q 06Which script, pressed into wet clay with a cut reed, did Assyrian scribes use for letters and royal records?
Cuneiform
Cuneiform is named for the Latin word for wedge, the mark a reed stylus leaves in clay, and it stayed in use for more than three thousand years.
Q 07Which militant group bulldozed and blew up Assyrian palace ruins in 2015, calling the ancient carvings blasphemous?
Islamic State
Islamic State filmed its fighters at work with hammers, bulldozers and explosives, and the head of UNESCO called the destruction a war crime.
Q 08According to Herodotus, which creatures gnawed through an Assyrian army's quivers and bowstrings as it attacked Egypt?
Mice
Mice may be a memory of disease in the camp: the Bible has an angel strike down 185,000 men of the same army in one night, and some historians suspect plague.
Q 09Which religion did the Assyrians adopt in the first centuries AD, long after their empire fell?
Christianity
Christianity took root among the Assyrians so early that their Church of the East became one of the faith's great missionary bodies, spreading it across Asia.
Q 10Which Assyrian wind demon, made famous by the film The Exorcist, was worn on amulets to protect pregnant women?
Pazuzu
Pazuzu was feared in his own right, but his image was thought to drive the baby-snatching demoness Lamashtu back to the underworld, so mothers wore his head as a charm.
Q 11What name is given to the human-headed winged bulls that guarded the gateways of Assyrian palaces?
Lamassu
Lamassu at the earlier palaces were carved with five legs, so that a visitor sees two from the front and four from the side.
Q 12Which wheeled siege weapon do Assyrian palace carvings show being pushed up earthen ramps to smash city walls?
Battering ram
The battering ram was one of Assyria's great contributions to siege warfare, and crews draped it in wet animal skins so that defenders could not set it alight.
Q 13Which stepped temple tower did Assyrian kings raise beside their shrines, as Sumerians and Babylonians had before them?
Ziggurat
A ziggurat had a core of sun-baked brick under a skin of fired brick, and kings sometimes had their names stamped on the glazed outer layer.
Q 21Which Assyrian king, remembered as the empire's last great ruler, sent out scribes to stock his vast library?
Ashurbanipal
Ashurbanipal's collection may have held over 100,000 texts, and it was not surpassed in size until the Library of Alexandria several centuries later.
Q 22Which Assyrian king razed Babylon in 689 BC and was murdered eight years later by two of his sons?
Sennacherib
Sennacherib destroyed the city after years of Babylonian revolts had cost him a son, and his own murder shocked his contemporaries.
Q 23Which biblical kingdom, land of the Ten Lost Tribes, was conquered by Assyria around 720 BC?
Israel
Israel was not emptied by the conquest: many people stayed on around Samaria and eventually came to be known as the Samaritans.
Q 14Which fragrant timber did Assyrian kings bring from distant western mountains to roof their grandest palaces?
Cedar
Cedar was so admired that one king planted a man-made hill with it beside his new capital, copying the mountains of north Syria.
Q 15On which river did the Assyrians build their first capital and, further upstream, their largest city?
Tigris
The Tigris flows faster than its siltier twin to the west, and its old Sumerian name can be read as the swift river.
Q 16Which Babylonian crown prince crushed Egypt's army at Carchemish in 605 BC, ending hopes of an Assyrian revival?
Nebuchadnezzar
Nebuchadnezzar took the throne that same year when his father died, and went on to rule Babylon for 43 years, the longest reign of his dynasty.
Q 17Which English poet wrote the 1821 tragedy Sardanapalus, about a pleasure-loving last king of Assyria?
Lord Byron
Lord Byron's play was a source for Delacroix's huge canvas of the king's death, and Berlioz won the Prix de Rome in 1830 with a cantata on the same story.
Q 18Which legendary warrior-queen of Greek tradition grew out of the real Assyrian queen Shammuramat?
Semiramis
Semiramis was credited in legend with founding Babylon and even with inventing trousers; the real queen's husband and son both ruled Assyria.
Q 19In which modern country did Assyrian merchants run a trading colony at Kanesh nearly 4,000 years ago?
Turkey
Turkey's Kültepe mound has given up over 22,000 clay tablets from the colony, nearly all from the merchants' quarter rather than the local king's upper city.
Q 20Which small engraved stones did Assyrian officials roll across wet clay to mark documents as their own?
Cylinder seals
Cylinder seals were usually pierced through the middle and worn on a necklace, so that the owner's signature was always to hand.
Q 24Which people from ancient Iran joined the Babylonians to sack Assyria's greatest city in 612 BC?
Medes
The Medes, ruled by King Cyaxares, had already sacked the sacred city of Assur two years earlier, before their Babylonian allies had even arrived.
Q 25Which language overtook Akkadian as the everyday tongue of the Assyrian Empire from the 9th century BC onwards?
Aramaic
Aramaic pushed Akkadian back into the palace as a language of the elite, and it remained the common tongue of the region until the 14th century AD.
Q 26Which crime novelist cleaned ancient Assyrian ivories with her face cream while her husband led the excavation?
Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie also used a fine knitting needle and an orange stick on the carvings, which her husband Max Mallowan was finding by the thousand.
Q 27Which sky event sent Assyrian kings into hiding while a stand-in sat on the throne to take the bad luck?
An eclipse
An eclipse was read as a death sentence for a king, so a substitute reigned for up to a hundred days and was then put to death in his place.
Q 28Which animals did Assyrian state messengers ride in pairs between relay stations to speed the king's letters?
Mules
Mules were picked for their strength and hardiness, and riding with two meant a messenger could swap mounts and was never stranded by a lame one.
Q 29Which metal did Assyrian armies adopt for weapons and armour as the empire expanded after 900 BC?
Iron
Iron and the large-scale use of cavalry were the two most important military developments of the age, and Assyrian tactics were copied for millennia.
Q 30Assyrian kings headed off revolts by forcing an estimated four million conquered people to do what over 250 years?
Resettle far from home
Made to resettle far from home, peoples were swapped between regions to blur old identities, while skilled deportees were put to work in their own trades.