Cairo Trivia
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59 free Cairo trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Cairo is a thousand years old but stands beside pyramids four and a half thousand years older, and this quiz covers both. It starts with Memphis and Heliopolis, the Roman fortress of Babylon and the tent-city of Fustat, then follows the Fatimid founders of 969, Ibn Tulun's mosque, Saladin's Citadel and wall, the Mamluk slave-soldiers, Selim I stripping the marble, Muhammad Ali's rise, Khedive Ismail's Paris on the Nile, Black Saturday, Nasser and Tahrir. The landmarks come next: the Alabaster Mosque, Al-Azhar and its park, Khan el-Khalili, the Nilometer, the Fatimid gates, the Egyptian Museum's 170,000 objects, the Grand Egyptian Museum's Tutankhamun hall, the Sphinx, the Cairo Tower and its lotus lattice, Zamalek, Coptic Cairo and the Ben Ezra Synagogue. There are questions on the metro, the airport, Al Ahly and Zamalek, the Zabbaleen and the New Administrative Capital. Easy questions ask which country Cairo leads and what 'Tahrir' means; hard ones want the vizier who burned Fustat, the length of Saladin's wall and the CIA money behind the tower. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the city and its sites, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Try our Ancient Egypt and Pyramids quizzes next.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01As of 2025, roughly how many people lived in the Greater Cairo metropolitan area?
22 million
22 million. Fewer than half of them live in Cairo itself: the built-up area long ago jumped the Nile and now spreads across three governorates.
Q 02Cairo's Arabic name, al-Qāhirah, means what?
The Vanquisher
The Vanquisher, also rendered 'the Victorious'. In one telling the name was chosen because Mars, called 'the Conquering Star' in Arabic, was rising as the city was founded.
Q 03Egyptians often refer to Cairo by which name, which is also the Egyptian Arabic word for Egypt itself?
Maṣr
Maṣr. The name belonged to the town on this site before Cairo existed, so the quarter the capital grew from is still called Maṣr al-Qadima, 'Old Maṣr', in English Old Cairo.
Q 04Cairo was founded in 969 by which dynasty as its new capital?
The Fatimids
The Fatimids. Their Cairo was a royal enclosure closed to ordinary people, housing only the caliph's court, officials and troops, so Egyptians went on living and trading in the older town next door.
Q 05Which novelist's Cairo Trilogy helped make him the first Arab winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature?
Naguib Mahfouz
Naguib Mahfouz. In 1994 an extremist angered by one of his novels stabbed him in the neck outside his Cairo home; he survived, but nerve damage limited how much he could write.
Q 06Cairo is nicknamed 'the city of a thousand' what?
Minarets
Minarets. Many crown the mosque-and-tomb complexes that medieval sultans and their officers built to be remembered by, each patron adding a tower of his own to the skyline.
Q 07Which Arab general conquered Byzantine Egypt around 640 and founded the country's first mosque?
Amr ibn al-As
Amr ibn al-As. His army camped beside a Roman fortress on the Nile, the camp grew into Egypt's capital, and the mosque is said to stand where his own tent was pitched.
Q 08Nilometers like the one on Cairo's Roda Island measured the river's annual flood so that rulers could set what?
Taxes
Taxes. A strong flood promised a rich harvest, so the levy went up, while a weak one warned of famine.
Q 09Which mosque, built between 876 and 879, is the oldest in Cairo to keep its original form?
Ibn Tulun
Ibn Tulun. When the Abbasids retook Egypt in 905 they razed his capital, al-Qata'i, to the ground and spared only its mosque, which is why it still stands much as he built it.
Q 10Al-Azhar in Cairo, now the foremost seat of Sunni learning, was founded in the 970s to spread which branch of Islam?
Shia Islam
Shia Islam. Cairo's founders were Ismaili Shia and built Al-Azhar to teach their doctrine; the Sunni conqueror who ousted them suspended its classes, and it later revived as a Sunni school.
Q 11Which ruler began building the Cairo Citadel in 1176?
Saladin
Saladin. He raised the fortress to shield Cairo from Crusader attack and to house his new regime, and Egypt's rulers went on governing from it until the 19th century.
Q 12The great mosque of Cairo's Citadel, built 1832–57, is nicknamed after which stone covering its walls?
Alabaster
The viceroy who commissioned it chose an Ottoman and European style quite unlike traditional Cairene mosques.
Q 13Which Ottoman sultan, nicknamed 'the Grim', captured Cairo in 1517 and ended Mamluk rule in Egypt?
Selim I
Selim I. With Cairo taken, the sharif of Mecca submitted to him as well, so the Ottoman sultans became guardians of Islam's holy cities while Egypt shrank to a province.
Q 21The Grand Egyptian Museum, fully opened in November 2025, shows the complete tomb treasures of which pharaoh?
Tutankhamun
Tutankhamun. The crowded old museum on Tahrir Square had room for only part of the hoard, so much of it sat in storage until the new galleries showed the whole tomb together.
Q 22Which plateau on the western edge of Greater Cairo holds the Great Sphinx and the last surviving ancient Wonder?
Giza
Giza. Its three great royal tombs were once sheathed in smooth white limestone, but nearly all of it has been stripped off over the centuries, much of it said to have gone into the buildings of Cairo.
Q 23Egyptologists generally agree that the head of the Great Sphinx depicts which pharaoh?
Khafre
Q 14The Mamluks, former slave soldiers who ruled Egypt from Cairo, halted which invaders at Ain Jalut in 1260?
The Mongols
The Mongols. Bought as boys and trained for the sultan's army, the Mamluks seized power for themselves in 1250 and, ten years later, stopped the Mongol advance on Egypt.
Q 15Which disease reached Cairo in 1348 and killed about a third of its people as the boy sultan fled?
Plague
Plague. The Black Death killed some 200,000 Cairenes within months and left whole quarters of what had been the Mediterranean's biggest city standing empty.
Q 16Which officer, sent to Egypt with an Albanian regiment, became its viceroy in 1805 after the French withdrawal?
Muhammad Ali Pasha
Muhammad Ali Pasha. In 1811 he invited the Mamluk leaders to a celebration at the Citadel and had his troops kill them as they gathered, removing his last rivals for Egypt.
Q 17Which 19th-century ruler commissioned Cairo's 'Paris on the Nile' downtown, where Tahrir Square was first named after him?
Khedive Ismail
Khedive Ismail. His spending ran Egypt so deep into debt that only part of the plan was built, he sold its Suez Canal shares to Britain, and in 1879 he was deposed.
Q 18What does 'Tahrir', the name of Cairo's famous central square, mean?
Liberation
Liberation. The name became official after the 1952 revolution swept away the monarchy, and in 2011 protesters filled the square for weeks until Hosni Mubarak resigned.
Q 19The 1952 riots that destroyed hundreds of shops, cinemas and hotels in downtown Cairo are known as what?
Black Saturday
Black Saturday. The riots broke out the day after British troops killed about 50 Egyptian policemen in a Suez Canal town, and within six months army officers had overthrown the king.
Q 20Which singer, called the 'Star of the East', drew millions of mourners into Cairo's streets at her 1975 funeral?
Umm Kulthum
Umm Kulthum. For decades she gave a concert on the first Thursday of every month, carried by radio from Cairo, and news of her death set off an outpouring of public grief.
Khafre. The face has lost its nose, but not to Napoleon's gunners, as the story goes: drawings made decades before he reached Egypt already show it missing.
Q 24Beyond Cairo the Nile divides into the Damietta branch and which other?
Rosetta
Rosetta. French soldiers found the Rosetta Stone in 1799 near the port town that shares the branch's name, and the find let scholars decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Q 25The Cairo Tower's open concrete lattice is said to evoke which plant, a symbol of ancient Egypt?
Lotus
Lotus. The tower's funding was less serene: it was reportedly built with CIA cash that Egypt's president took as an insulting bribe and spent on a monument instead.
Q 26Which Nile island in central Cairo, whose name is simply Arabic for 'island', holds the Cairo Tower and the Opera House?
Gezira
Gezira. Egypt's ruler built a palace on it in 1869 to lodge royal guests at the opening of the Suez Canal, and the building is now the heart of a Marriott hotel.
Q 27Khan el-Khalili, the famous bazaar in Cairo's historic centre, takes its name from what kind of building?
A caravanserai
A caravanserai. In the 1380s a sultan's master of the stables, Jaharkas al-Khalili, built an inn for merchants here, and his name spread from that one khan to the whole district.
Q 28On every train of Cairo's metro, the first built in Africa, the two middle cars are reserved for whom?
Women
Women. A women-only car was introduced in 1989 to spare them harassment, though women remain free to ride anywhere else on the train.
Q 29Cairo's football derby sets Al Ahly against which club, ranked second to it among CAF's clubs of the 20th century?
Zamalek
Zamalek. The club was officially called Farouk, after the king, until the 1952 revolution removed him, when it took the name of Cairo's Zamalek district instead.
Q 30Which regional organisation has its headquarters in Cairo?
The Arab League
The Arab League. Its members moved the headquarters to Tunis in 1979 to punish Egypt for making peace with Israel, and it did not return to Cairo until 1990.