Global History
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96 free Global History trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
16 free Global History trivia questions with answers. Global History trivia lives in two places on BrainPickle. This page is the shorter set; the main quiz is World History trivia, with our deepest question pool on the topic and a source behind every answer.
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Q 01Which writing system, pressed into clay tablets, did the Sumerians develop in Mesopotamia?
Cuneiform
Cuneiform means 'wedge-shaped', after the marks a cut reed left in wet clay; it grew out of accounting records kept in the city of Uruk and stayed in use for some 3,000 years.
Q 02The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas split newly found lands outside Europe between Castile and which other seafaring kingdom?
Portugal
Portugal and Castile drew their line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands; the far side of the globe was only divided in 1529, by the Treaty of Zaragoza.
Q 03Mansa Musa, famous for the gold he spent on his pilgrimage to Mecca, ruled which West African state?
Mali
Mali reached its territorial peak under Mansa Musa; he brought scholars home from his pilgrimage, among them the Andalusian poet al-Sahili, and helped make Timbuktu a centre of Islamic learning.
Q 04Which Greek philosopher founded the Peripatetic school, also known as the Lyceum?
Aristotle
Aristotle founded the school at Athens' Lyceum around 335 BC; 'Peripatetic' comes from the Greek for walking about, after the covered walk where he is said to have paced as he taught.
Q 05In Roman tradition, the expulsion of King Tarquin the Proud in 509 BCE replaced the monarchy with which form of government?
Republic
A republic: in the traditional account the Romans handed the king's powers to two consuls elected for a single year, a check on any return to one-man rule.
Q 06Born Temüjin, which ruler united the nomadic tribes of the Mongolian plateau and founded the Mongol Empire in 1206?
Genghis Khan
Genghis Khan took that title at an assembly of chiefs in 1206; to break old tribal loyalties he then regrouped his people into military units of a thousand under commanders he chose.
Q 07Which explorer led the first circumnavigation expedition but did not complete the journey?
Ferdinand Magellan
Ferdinand Magellan sailed from Spain in 1519 and was killed on Mactan in the Philippines in 1521; Juan Sebastián Elcano brought the last ship, the Victoria, home in 1522.
Q 08Which weapon, sprayed from tubes on Byzantine warships, helped save Constantinople from Arab fleets in the 670s and again in 717?
Greek fire
Greek fire burned even on water; its recipe was such a closely guarded state secret that it was eventually lost, and historians still argue over what went into it.
Q 09Which Italian-born explorer, sailing for the Spanish crown, made four Atlantic crossings that opened the Americas to European colonisation?
Christopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus was Genoese but sailed for Castile; how far he grasped that he had found new lands is unclear, as he never clearly gave up his belief that he had reached the Far East.
Q 10Which Mongol ruler completed the conquest of China and established the Yuan Dynasty in the 13th century?
Kublai Khan
Kublai Khan proclaimed the Great Yuan in 1271 and crushed the last Song loyalists in 1279, yet the invasion fleets he later sent overseas, among them one against Java, ended in failure.
Q 11Which Turco-Mongol conqueror took power in 1370 and campaigned across Central Asia, Persia and India, sacking Delhi in 1398?
Tamerlane
Tamerlane is the Western form of 'Timur the Lame', a nickname from wounds that crippled his right leg and arm; he died in 1405 while setting out to invade China.
Q 12Around 3100 BC, centuries before the pyramids, which early king is traditionally credited with unifying Upper and Lower Egypt?
Narmer
Narmer appears on a ceremonial palette wearing the white crown of Upper Egypt on one side and the red crown of Lower Egypt on the other; some scholars identify him with the legendary Menes.
Q 13Odoacer's removal of the boy emperor Romulus Augustulus in 476 is traditionally taken as the end of which empire?
Western Roman
Q 21Magna Carta was sealed by King John at which meadow near Windsor in June 1215?
Runnymede
Runnymede, a meadow beside the Thames near Windsor, is where King John sealed Magna Carta on 15 June 1215; Pope Innocent III annulled the charter within months, sparking the First Barons' War.
Q 22Stephen Langton, who mediated between King John and the rebel barons over Magna Carta, held which church office?
Archbishop of Canterbury
Archbishop of Canterbury: King John refused for years to accept Langton's election, and the Pope answered by laying England under an interdict that lasted from 1208 to 1214.
Q 23Which pre-Columbian empire called itself Tawantinsuyu, 'the four parts together', after the four provinces it was divided into?
Inca
The Western Roman Empire ended quietly: Odoacer spared the young emperor, retired him to a fortress in Campania and sent the imperial regalia east to Emperor Zeno.
Q 14Which country is widely recognized as the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution?
Great Britain
Great Britain, with its coal, canals and textile mills, saw the Industrial Revolution begin around 1760; it spread to continental Europe and the United States by about 1840.
Q 15Which 1942-43 battle on the Volga ended with the surrender of Germany's Sixth Army?
Battle of Stalingrad
The Battle of Stalingrad turned when a Soviet pincer, Operation Uranus, trapped the Sixth Army; Hitler forbade a breakout and made Paulus a field marshal, expecting suicide, but he surrendered instead.
Q 16What post-WWII US initiative funded Western Europe's reconstruction?
Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan, officially known as the European Recovery Program, was a U.S.-sponsored initiative launched in 1948 to help rebuild war-torn Western European economies and counter the spread of communism.
Q 17The Black Death of 1346-1353 was caused by which bacterium?
Yersinia pestis
Yersinia pestis was confirmed as the culprit in 2010, when its DNA was recovered from plague victims in mass graves across Europe; it is named after Alexandre Yersin, who identified it in 1894.
Q 18Which Chinese invention spread west along the Silk Road after workshops in Samarkand began making it in the 8th century?
Paper
Paper reached Samarkand around 751, by one tradition through Chinese prisoners taken at the Battle of Talas; Baghdad was making it by the 790s, long before Europe's first mills.
Q 19Johannes Gutenberg, who developed printing with movable metal type around 1440, worked in which craft?
Goldsmith
Goldsmith: Gutenberg appears among Strasbourg's goldsmiths in the 1430s, and that metalworking skill lay behind the hand mould he is traditionally credited with, which let type be cast quickly and in quantity.
Q 20The Jikji, the oldest surviving book printed with movable metal type, was produced in 1377 in which country?
Korea
Korea's Jikji, a collection of Buddhist teachings, was printed 78 years before Gutenberg's Bible; its one surviving volume is held by the National Library of France.
The Inca ran their four quarters from Cusco without writing or wheeled transport, keeping accounts on knotted cords called quipus.
Q 24Which Spanish conquistador took a room filled with gold as ransom for the captured Inca emperor Atahualpa?
Francisco Pizarro
Francisco Pizarro saw the room filled once with gold and twice with silver, then had Atahualpa garrotted anyway in 1533.
Q 25The Meiji Restoration of 1868 returned control of Japan, at least in name, to which institution?
The Emperor
The Emperor, the teenage Meiji, was the figurehead of a coup in Kyoto that ended more than two centuries of shogun rule; the young samurai who staged it then ran the new government.
Q 26What did East German troops first use to seal the Berlin border overnight on 13 August 1961?
Barbed wire
Barbed wire went up overnight on what became known in Germany as Barbed Wire Sunday; concrete blocks soon replaced it, and East Germany named the barrier its 'Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart'.
Q 27The Rosetta Stone records a decree issued in 196 BC on behalf of which ruler?
Ptolemy V Epiphanes
Ptolemy V Epiphanes was a boy-king when the priests of Memphis issued the decree in his honour; because its Greek text could be read, the stone became the key to the two Egyptian scripts.
Q 28The Rosetta Stone was found in 1799 by an officer of which army?
The French
French officer Pierre-François Bouchard found the stone in 1799 while Napoleon's army was rebuilding a fort at Rashid (Rosetta); Britain took it under the 1801 Capitulation of Alexandria.
Q 29Which scholar announced the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822?
Jean-François Champollion
Jean-François Champollion presented his 'Lettre à M. Dacier' to the Académie des Inscriptions in September 1822, showing hieroglyphs recorded sounds as well as ideas; rival Thomas Young had earlier identified only some phonetic signs.
Q 30The brick-and-stone Great Wall that tourists walk today near Beijing was built by which dynasty?
Ming
Ming builders used brick and stone where earlier dynasties had rammed earth, which is why their wall, raised after 1368, is the best preserved.