Baghdad Trivia
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50 free Baghdad trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Baghdad trivia quiz covers the Iraqi capital from al-Mansur's Round City of 762 to the metropolis of eight million on the Tigris today. The easy questions are ones any traveller or history reader can answer: the river, the caliphate that founded the city, the great library of the Islamic Golden Age, the collection of tales set at Harun al-Rashid's court, and the square where a statue came down in 2003. The harder end is for history and Middle East buffs: what the name Baghdad may mean, the astrologers who fixed the founding date, the gates of the Round City, the caliph who turned the House of Wisdom into a public academy, the Mongol prince who sacked the city in 1258, Timur's grim order in 1401, the Ottoman sultan who retook it in 1638, the pact signed there in 1955, the sculptor behind the split turquoise dome of the Martyr's Memorial, the tower with the revolving restaurant, and the street of bookshops named for a poet. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the city, its monuments and its rulers before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Iraq, Tehran and Ancient Mesopotamia quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01On which river does Baghdad stand?
Tigris
Tigris. Baghdad sits where the river runs closest to the Euphrates, about 40 km away, so canals could join the two and boats brought trade from both.
Q 02Which caliph founded Baghdad in 762 AD?
Al-Mansur
Al-Mansur picked a spot where, by Arab accounts, little stood but a Christian monastery. Its monks are said to have encouraged him to build there.
Q 03Which caliphate made Baghdad its capital in the 8th century?
Abbasid
Abbasid caliphs overthrew the Umayyads of Damascus with strong Persian support, so they turned the empire eastward and built their new capital in Iraq, closer to those backers.
Q 04What did Baghdad's founder officially name his new capital?
City of Peace
City of Peace, Madinat as-Salam in Arabic, was the official name. People kept using the site's much older name, Baghdad, which in the end replaced it.
Q 05Which meaning is most often given for the name Baghdad?
Bestowed by God
Bestowed by God is the usual reading, from Persian bagh, god, and dad, given, though the origin is disputed. The name is older than Islam, kept from a settlement already on the site.
Q 06What shape was the city that Baghdad's founder laid out in 762?
A circle
A circle, with the caliph's palace and mosque alone at the centre. The ruler sat at the heart of his capital, and only he was allowed to enter that inner court on horseback.
Q 07Which experts chose 30 July 762 as the day to start building Baghdad?
Astrologers
Astrologers. The caliph left the timing of his Islamic capital to Naubakht, a former Zoroastrian, and Mashallah, who was Jewish, and they judged the day auspicious.
Q 08A reported 100,000 workers built the caliph's new city of Baghdad out of which material?
Brick
Brick. The river plain has no stone quarries and almost no timber, so, like Babylon long before it, the caliph's city rose from sun-dried and kiln-fired mud.
Q 09Each of the four gates of Baghdad's original city was named after what?
The place its road led to
The place its road led to: Kufa, Basra, Syria and Khurasan. Shops lined the four roads running in from the gates until the caliph moved the markets out of the city.
Q 10Which great library and academy made Baghdad the 'Center of Learning'?
House of Wisdom
House of Wisdom. A later chronicler claimed that Mongol troops threw so many of the city's books into the river in 1258 that the water turned black, though historians now find its libraries soon reopened.
Q 11Scholars in ninth-century Baghdad translated the science and philosophy of which ancient civilisation into Arabic?
Greece
Greece. Baghdad's translators, many of them Syriac-speaking Christians, put Aristotle, Euclid and Ptolemy into Arabic, and those versions later helped carry Greek learning back to Europe.
Q 12Which story collection sets many tales in the Baghdad of the caliphs?
One Thousand and One Nights
One Thousand and One Nights took its frame story from Persia and India, yet most of the tales themselves are Arabic additions, and a great many of those unfold in the caliphs' capital.
Q 13Which Baghdad caliph exchanged gifts and envoys with Charlemagne?
Harun al-Rashid
Q 21Which Persian dynasty seized Baghdad under its founder, Shah Ismail I?
Safavid
Safavid forces took the city under Shah Ismail I, and for over a century it passed back and forth between Shia Persia and the Sunni Ottomans until a 1639 treaty left it in Ottoman hands for good.
Q 22What did Baghdad's reforming Ottoman governor Midhat Pasha tear down around 1870?
City walls
The city walls. Midhat Pasha, following the example of European cities, pulled the crumbling ramparts down in a burst of modernising zeal so that the freed land could be used.
Q 23Which Baghdad-born merchant family, the 'Rothschilds of the East', built a trading empire across India and China?
The Sassoons
Harun al-Rashid sent the Frankish king silks, perfume, an elephant that reached Aachen in 802, and a water clock that marked the hours by dropping bronze balls into a bowl.
Q 14Which Spanish city, seat of a rival caliphate, vied with Baghdad in its golden age?
Córdoba
Córdoba. Its rulers descended from a young Umayyad prince who escaped the massacre of his family and fled across the empire to Spain, where his heirs later declared a caliphate of their own.
Q 15To which city did the caliphs move their capital from Baghdad for much of the 9th century?
Samarra
Samarra. The caliph's Turkish slave-soldiers kept clashing with the people of Baghdad, so in 836 he built a new capital for them, and the court stayed away for over half a century.
Q 16When the Seljuks took Baghdad in 1055, real power passed to rulers with which title?
Sultan
Sultan. Tughril Beg drove out the Buyids, who had controlled Baghdad for a century, and the Seljuk sultans then ruled in the caliph's name, leaving him a respected figurehead.
Q 17Hulegu, who sacked Baghdad in 1258, was whose grandson?
Genghis Khan
Genghis Khan. His grandson Hulegu's capture of Baghdad ended five centuries of caliphs ruling there, and the city never regained its place as the centre of the Islamic world.
Q 18Mongols reportedly trampled Baghdad's last caliph after rolling him in what?
A carpet
A carpet: spilling royal blood was taboo for the Mongols, so they killed him without shedding any. Marco Polo told a different tale, in which the caliph was locked in a tower with his treasure and left to starve.
Q 19What did Timur order every one of his soldiers to bring him after storming Baghdad in 1401?
Severed heads
Severed heads: one or two for every soldier, depending on the chronicler. Tens of thousands of townspeople were killed to fill the order.
Q 20Which Ottoman ruler first took Baghdad from Persia in the 1530s?
Suleiman the Magnificent
Suleiman the Magnificent took the city without a siege, the shah having given ground instead of fighting, and won over local Sunnis by restoring the tomb of the jurist Abu Hanifa.
The Sassoons. David Sassoon, a leading Baghdad merchant, fled the city and in 1832 settled in Bombay, where he founded the banking and trading firm that made the family's fortune.
Q 24The German-financed railway begun towards Baghdad in the 1900s is popularly named after Baghdad and which other city?
Berlin
Berlin. Germany wanted a route to the Persian Gulf, but money troubles and tunnelling through the Taurus Mountains slowed the line so badly that the first train from Istanbul ran only in 1940.
Q 25Britain took Baghdad from the Ottomans in which war?
World War I
World War I. General Maude's army marched in on 11 March 1917, ending almost three centuries of unbroken Ottoman rule, and Maude himself died of cholera in the city eight months later.
Q 26The 1955 Baghdad Pact joined Iraq, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and Britain to contain which power?
The Soviet Union
The Soviet Union. Iraq walked out of its own pact after its monarchy was overthrown, so the headquarters left Baghdad for Ankara and the alliance was renamed CENTO.
Q 27Whose 1957 plan for Baghdad included a cultural island and a 300-foot caliph statue?
Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright was hired in 1957 to design an opera house and came back with a whole cultural quarter. A year later the monarchy that hired him was overthrown, and none of it was built.
Q 28Where in Baghdad was Saddam Hussein's statue toppled in April 2003?
Firdos Square
Firdos Square faces the Palestine Hotel, where the foreign press was staying, so the toppling went out live around the world. The statue itself was only a year old, put up for Saddam's 65th birthday.
Q 29Baghdad's Victory Arch, two giant fists holding crossed swords, was built to celebrate which war?
Iran–Iraq War
Iran–Iraq War. Work on the victory parade ground began in 1986, two years before the fighting ended in stalemate, and the giant fists were modelled on casts of Saddam Hussein's own forearms.
Q 30Which colour is the 40-metre split dome of Baghdad's Al-Shaheed Monument?
Turquoise
Turquoise, the colour of the glazed tiles on its two offset half-domes, which shelter an eternal flame. Built for the dead of one war, it is now seen by Iraqis as a memorial to all their fallen.