The Bronze Age Trivia
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57 free The Bronze Age trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Bronze Age trivia quiz covers the era, roughly 3300 to 1200 BC in the Near East, when humans first alloyed copper with tin and built the first cities, empires and writing systems. The easy questions handle the basics: what bronze is made of, which ages come before and after, the Danish museum curator who invented the three-age system, the first civilization to enter the period and the pharaoh who fought at Kadesh. From there it moves through the great Bronze Age worlds: Sumer and Akkad, the Old and New Kingdoms of Egypt, the Hittites, the Minoans of Crete and the Mycenaeans of Greece, the Indus cities and Shang China's ritual bronzes and oracle bones. The harder half is for archaeology fans: the ten tons of oxhide copper ingots on the Uluburun wreck, the looters who dug up the Nebra sky disc, the Trundholm sun chariot, the Amesbury Archer's Swiss teeth, the Great Orme copper mine, the Yamnaya and the first chariots at Sintashta, the Sea Peoples on the walls of Medinet Habu, and the theories for why the whole system fell apart around 1200 BC. If you enjoyed our ancient Egypt, Sumer or Stone Age quizzes, this is the deep dive on the age of bronze. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries for the Bronze Age, the Late Bronze Age collapse and the sites, cultures and artefacts named before publishing.
30 of 57 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Bronze is an alloy consisting primarily of copper together with which other metal?
Tin
Tin. Around a tenth of the mix is enough to make copper far harder, but tin ore is scarce, so the mines of Cornwall ended up supplying bronze-smiths across much of Europe.
Q 02In the three-age system, the Bronze Age sits between which two other ages?
Stone and Iron
Stone and Iron. The ages are stages rather than fixed dates: Britain's Bronze Age began only around 2000 BC, about a thousand years after the Old World's first.
Q 03Which Danish curator developed the three-age system while arranging a Copenhagen museum's antiquities?
Christian Jürgensen Thomsen
Christian Jürgensen Thomsen. He dated objects by noting which kinds were found buried together, which gave prehistory its first evidence-based order.
Q 04Which weapon was a Bronze Age invention, unknown to earlier hunters and warriors?
The sword
The sword. It grew out of the dagger as smiths learned to cast ever longer blades in copper and bronze, and it stayed the leading hand weapon for thousands of years.
Q 05Before the classic recipe took hold, many early bronzes hardened copper with which poisonous element?
Arsenic
Arsenic. It occurs naturally in some copper ores, so the first such alloys may have been accidents; later smiths may have picked the right ores by the garlic smell they gave off when heated.
Q 06Why did iron, much commoner than copper, come into common use only after bronze?
It needs far hotter furnaces
It needs far hotter furnaces. Copper melts at about 1,085 °C but pure iron only near 1,540 °C, so early smiths could never pour iron and instead hammered it out of a glowing, spongy lump.
Q 07Which region is usually credited as first into the Bronze Age, with the rise of Sumer?
West Asia and the Near East
West Asia and the Near East. Sumer's river plain had almost no metal of its own, so every ingot had to be traded in from distant mountains, making it a land of merchants from the start.
Q 08Which stepped temple towers, like the one built at Ur around 2100 BC, crowned Bronze Age Mesopotamian cities?
Ziggurats
Ziggurats. Each was a solid mass of mud brick with no rooms inside, and the great one at Babylon is popularly linked with the Bible's Tower of Babel.
Q 09Which region's archaeology has no Bronze Age, using stages such as Formative and Classic instead?
The Americas
The Americas. Metalworking reached Mexico and the Maya late, between about AD 600 and 900, and then mostly for bells and ornaments, long after their great stone cities had risen.
Q 10Egypt's Late Bronze Age, when its empire reached its peak, is known as which period?
The New Kingdom
The New Kingdom. It began when the princes of Thebes drove out the Hyksos, foreign rulers of the Delta; their successors then pushed Egyptian power far up the Nile and deep into the Levant.
Q 11The Hittites ruled an empire across Anatolia and northern Syria from which capital city?
Hattusa
Hattusa. An earlier king had razed the city and laid a curse on anyone who resettled it; the Hittite ruler who moved in anyway took the name Hattusili, 'the one from Hattusa'.
Q 12Which pharaoh fought the Hittites at Kadesh around 1274 BC, then had the battle carved on his temples as a triumph?
Ramesses II
Ramesses II. Surprised by a Hittite chariot charge, he rallied his army to scrape a draw and never did take Kadesh, yet his reliefs show a great victory.
Q 13A replica of the Egyptian-Hittite peace treaty hangs at which organisation's headquarters?
The United Nations
Q 21Which Babylonian king of the Bronze Age had 282 laws carved on a tall stone pillar?
Hammurabi
Hammurabi. Six centuries later an invader carried the pillar off as loot to Susa, in what is now Iran, where a French expedition dug it up in 1901; it now stands in the Louvre.
Q 22Which mysterious raiders, shown fighting Egypt in the temple reliefs at Medinet Habu, are often blamed for the Late Bronze Age collapse?
The Sea Peoples
The Sea Peoples. The name is a modern coinage, and nearly everything known about them comes from the Egyptian side, so who they were and where they came from is still disputed.
Q 23Which king of Uruk is the hero of a Bronze Age Mesopotamian epic about a failed search for eternal life?
Gilgamesh
The United Nations. Sealed some fifteen years after the two empires fought at Kadesh, the pact pledged lasting peace and mutual help, and it is often called the oldest known peace treaty.
Q 14The Amarna letters, diplomatic correspondence of 14th-century BC Egypt, are unusual because they are written in which script?
Cuneiform
Cuneiform. Babylonian was the shared diplomatic language of the day, so even the pharaoh's scribes wrote to foreign courts in its wedge-shaped script, pressed into clay tablets.
Q 15The Bronze Age Minoan civilization, builders of the palace of Knossos, was centred on which island?
Crete
Crete. The label Minoan is modern: the excavator Arthur Evans popularised it in honour of Minos, the island's legendary king and keeper of the Minotaur.
Q 16The Mycenaean Greeks adapted a Minoan script into which system, the first record of the Greek language?
Linear B
Linear B. It was cracked in 1952 by Michael Ventris, an architect and amateur code-breaker, who showed that the palace tablets recorded an early form of Greek.
Q 17Which archaeologist found the so-called 'Mask of Agamemnon' at Mycenae in 1876?
Heinrich Schliemann
Heinrich Schliemann. He was sure he had found Homer's king, but the mask was made in the 16th century BC, some three centuries before any plausible Trojan War.
Q 18Thera, whose Bronze Age eruption is sometimes blamed for weakening the Minoans, is better known today as which island?
Santorini
Santorini. The island is the surviving rim of the exploded volcano, its cliffs ringing a sea-filled crater, and the ash that buried the town of Akrotiri kept its houses and wall paintings intact.
Q 19Which Mediterranean island, a major copper supplier since the Bronze Age, gave the metal its name?
Cyprus
Cyprus. The Romans called the metal 'aes Cyprium', metal of Cyprus, a phrase later worn down to 'cuprum', which is why copper's chemical symbol is Cu.
Q 20The Late Bronze Age collapse of about 1200 BC plunged which land into a 'Dark Age' that lasted for centuries?
Greece
Greece. Its palaces burned and the art of writing vanished there for centuries, until the Greeks borrowed a new alphabet from the Phoenicians.
Gilgamesh. Shaken by the death of his friend Enkidu, he travels to the ends of the earth to question the one man who survived a great flood sent by the gods.
Q 24The Uluburun shipwreck, a late-14th-century BC merchant vessel, was found off the coast of which modern country?
Turkey
Turkey. In 1982 a local sponge diver told archaeologists of 'metal biscuits with ears' on the seabed; they were copper ingots, and raising the cargo took more than 22,000 dives.
Q 25A scarab found in the Uluburun shipwreck bears the name of which Egyptian queen?
Nefertiti
Nefertiti. The scarab helps to date the wreck: the ship cannot have gone down before she became queen, in the middle of the 14th century BC.
Q 26The Nebra sky disc, the oldest known concrete depiction of the cosmos, was found in 1999 in which country?
Germany
Germany. Two men with a metal detector dug it up illegally and sold it; after passing between dealers in stolen goods, it was seized by police in a sting in Basel in 2002.
Q 27The cluster of seven stars on the Nebra sky disc is generally interpreted as which star group?
The Pleiades
The Pleiades. The disc's other stars seem to have been spaced so that no constellation forms, leaving this one cluster to stand out; ancient farmers timed ploughing and harvest by its rising and setting.
Q 28Tutankhamun was buried with an iron dagger when smelted iron was still very rare; where did its metal come from?
A meteorite
A meteorite. The blade's high nickel and cobalt content matches iron meteorites, and Egyptian texts of the next century use a word for the metal that translates as 'iron of the sky'.
Q 29The Bronze Age Trundholm sun chariot turned up in 1902 when what kind of land was first ploughed?
A former bog
A former bog. The horse-drawn sun disc is gilded on one face only, thought to show the bright sun crossing the sky by day and its dark side on the return journey by night.
Q 30Late Bronze Age Central Europe was dominated by which people, named for their cremation burials?
The Urnfield culture
The Urnfield culture. Its people buried the ashes of their dead in urns in flat cemeteries, and they seem to have lived with war: settlements were fortified and some warriors wore armour of beaten bronze.