History
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50 free History trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
History is full of turning points that shape daily life to this day, from the first written laws to the first trip into orbit. Knowing them makes the news, the map and half of all film plots easier to follow. This quiz covers the history trivia you should know: ancient rulers and wonders, medieval battles and plagues, the age of exploration, revolutions and empires, two world wars and the space race. Every question comes with a short explanation that adds the detail most people never hear. It suits pub quiz regulars, students brushing up before a test, teachers who need a ready-made round, and anyone who likes to learn something on a coffee break.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which inscribed slab, found by French soldiers in Egypt in 1799, gave scholars the key to reading hieroglyphs?
The Rosetta Stone
The Rosetta Stone repeats one decree in three scripts, and the Ancient Greek at the bottom let Jean-François Champollion work out the Egyptian above it by 1822.
Q 02Which queen of Egypt's Ptolemaic dynasty allied herself with Julius Caesar and then with Mark Antony?
Cleopatra
Cleopatra is the only ruler of her Greek-speaking family known to have learned Egyptian, the language of the people she governed.
Q 03Which volcano buried the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum under ash and pumice in AD 79?
Mount Vesuvius
Mount Vesuvius left one eyewitness account: Pliny the Younger watched from across the Bay of Naples and described the eruption in two letters.
Q 04Which charter did rebel barons force King John of England to seal at Runnymede in 1215?
Magna Carta
Magna Carta failed at first: neither side kept its word, the pope annulled it, and England slid into the First Barons' War.
Q 05Which Mongol ruler, born Temüjin, founded the largest contiguous land empire in history?
Genghis Khan
Genghis Khan was a title, taken at a great assembly in 1206; as a boy he had lost his father and seen his family abandoned by its tribe.
Q 06Which teenage peasant helped lift the English siege of Orléans in 1429 and was later burned at the stake?
Joan of Arc
Joan of Arc was cleared in 1456, when a church court overturned the verdict that had condemned her, and in 1920 she was made a saint.
Q 07Which Paris fortress-prison did a crowd storm on 14 July 1789, a date France now marks as its national holiday?
The Bastille
The Bastille held only seven inmates that day and was already scheduled for demolition, but revolutionaries saw it as a symbol of royal abuse of power.
Q 08Which country became the first in the world to give all women the vote in parliamentary elections, in 1893?
New Zealand
New Zealand let women vote in 1893 after petitions led by Kate Sheppard, yet women could not stand for Parliament there until 1919.
Q 09Which seamstress's refusal to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 set off a year-long boycott?
Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks was not the first: nine months earlier, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested in the same city for the same refusal.
Q 10Which general marched war elephants across the Alps to invade Italy during the Second Punic War?
Hannibal
Hannibal got elephants over the mountains and fielded them at the Trebia that December, but most or all of them died of wounds or cold that winter.
Q 11Which pharaoh's tomb did Howard Carter's team discover in Egypt's Valley of the Kings in 1922?
Tutankhamun
Tutankhamun died at about 19, and the more than 5,000 artifacts buried with him set off a worldwide wave of interest in ancient Egypt.
Q 12Which river did Julius Caesar lead a legion across in 49 BC, an act that began a Roman civil war?
The Rubicon
The Rubicon marked a boundary Caesar was not allowed to bring an army across, so crossing it meant defying the law at the risk of his life.
Q 13Which Greek philosopher did King Philip II of Macedon hire to tutor his son, the future Alexander the Great?
Aristotle
Aristotle's fee was a town: in return, Philip agreed to rebuild the philosopher's hometown of Stageira, which he had razed, and to free its enslaved citizens.
Q 21Which emperor of Mali handed out so much gold in Cairo on his 1324 pilgrimage that its value there reportedly fell?
Mansa Musa
Mansa Musa befriended officials in Cairo, and what they learned from him is how historians such as Al-Umari came to write about his distant country.
Q 22Which goldsmith had a movable-type printing press running by 1450 and used it to print a celebrated Bible?
Johannes Gutenberg
Johannes Gutenberg did not invent movable type, which was already in use in East Asia; his press made printing far faster.
Q 23Which Venetian merchant dictated the story of his travels through Asia to a cellmate while a prisoner of the Genoese?
Marco Polo
Q 14Which Greek city-state's king Leonidas died holding the pass of Thermopylae against a Persian invasion in 480 BC?
Sparta
Sparta's 300 did not stand alone at the end: 700 men from Thespiae stayed with them after a local named Ephialtes showed the Persians a path behind the pass.
Q 15Which ruler, the first emperor of a unified China, was buried near a life-sized Terracotta Army?
Qin Shi Huang
Qin Shi Huang's clay soldiers stayed buried until 1974, when farmers digging wells struck them. He also joined older state walls into a single Great Wall.
Q 16Which prehistoric monument on Salisbury Plain was built partly with rocks hauled all the way from Wales?
Stonehenge
Stonehenge was a burial ground too, and bone tests suggest many of the dead had come from near the Welsh source of its bluestones.
Q 17Which Mesopotamian king's law code was carved on a basalt pillar that now stands in the Louvre?
Hammurabi
Hammurabi's pillar was carried off as plunder 600 years after it was made and was found again in 1901 at Susa, in present-day Iran.
Q 18Which domed cathedral in Constantinople did Sultan Mehmed II convert into a mosque after taking the city in 1453?
Hagia Sophia
Hagia Sophia had served as the city's cathedral since its dedication in 360; it became a museum in 1935 and was redesignated a mosque in 2020.
Q 19Which battle of 14 October 1066 saw Duke William of Normandy defeat King Harold and begin the Norman Conquest?
Hastings
Hastings was fought from 9 am until dusk, and the English army gave way after Harold was killed, probably near the end of the day.
Q 20Which Norse explorer is thought to have reached North America about 500 years before Christopher Columbus?
Leif Erikson
Leif Erikson's voyage was known only from Icelandic sagas until the early 1960s, when a Norse site was identified at the northern tip of Newfoundland.
Marco Polo's cellmate, the writer Rustichello da Pisa, wove in tales of his own, and the finished book later inspired Christopher Columbus.
Q 24Which 14th-century pandemic, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, killed 30 to 60 percent of Europe's people?
The Black Death
The Black Death was not called that by those who lived through it: at the time, no European language described the plague as black.
Q 25Which Aztec capital, built on an island in Lake Texcoco, fell to the Spanish and their allies in 1521?
Tenochtitlan
Tenochtitlan shared its island with a second city-state, Tlatelolco, and both now lie beneath Mexico City.
Q 26Which Spanish conquistador captured the Inca emperor Atahualpa at Cajamarca in November 1532?
Francisco Pizarro
Francisco Pizarro demanded a ransom, and Atahualpa filled a room with gold as high as he could reach, yet Pizarro had him executed the following year.
Q 27Which priest's Ninety-five Theses of 1517 attacked the sale of indulgences and set off the Protestant Reformation?
Martin Luther
Martin Luther later translated the Bible into German, which opened it to ordinary readers and helped shape a standard form of the German language.
Q 28Which English king made himself head of the Church of England after the pope refused to annul his first marriage?
Henry VIII
Henry VIII wanted to remarry in pursuit of a male heir; he went on to marry six times and ordered the beheadings of two wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard.
Q 29Which Portuguese navigator led the Spanish fleet that first circled the globe but died in the Philippines?
Ferdinand Magellan
Ferdinand Magellan never finished the trip: after he was killed in battle, Juan Sebastián Elcano brought the surviving crew home to Spain in 1522.
Q 30Which astronomer was tried by the Roman Inquisition and forced to recant his support for a Sun-centred universe?
Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei was found suspect of heresy, and his sentence was commuted to house arrest, where he stayed for the rest of his life.