Humanities
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50 free Humanities trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The humanities are the subjects that study what people have made and thought: the stories they told, the pictures they painted, the music they wrote, the arguments they had about how to live, and the records they left behind. It is a wide field, which is what makes it good quiz material. One question can turn on a stolen painting, the next on a philosopher's last day or a composer who could not hear his own premiere. This quiz covers the ground a humanities course usually does. There are questions on literature from ancient epics to modern novels, on painters, sculptors and art movements, on classical music and the birth of a famous American sound, and on thinkers from ancient Athens to twentieth-century Paris. History, world religions, mythology, language and architecture each get their turn. The early questions are the ones most people have a fair shot at; the later ones reward a bit of reading. It works for students revising for an arts and humanities quiz, teachers who want ready-made questions with answers, pub quiz writers, and anyone who likes knowing the story behind a famous work. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches something.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Leonardo da Vinci portrait gained worldwide fame after a former Louvre workman stole it in 1911?
Mona Lisa
The Mona Lisa was taken by Vincenzo Peruggia, a workman who had helped build its glass case. He hid the painting in his apartment for two years, saying it belonged in Italy.
Q 02Which German composer was almost completely deaf when his Ninth Symphony was first performed in Vienna?
Beethoven
Beethoven was several bars adrift and still conducting when the contralto Caroline Unger turned him round to face the cheering audience. They waved hats and handkerchiefs so he could see the ovation.
Q 03In Miguel de Cervantes's novel, which structures does Don Quixote attack in the belief that they are giants?
Windmills
Windmills are the first thing Don Quixote charges once the farm labourer Sancho Panza has joined him as squire. The scene gave English its idiom for fighting imaginary enemies.
Q 04Which Athenian philosopher was sentenced to drink hemlock after a jury found him guilty of corrupting the young?
Socrates
Socrates spent his last day in prison with friends who offered him a way to escape, which he refused. He wrote nothing himself, so the trial is known mainly through his pupils' accounts.
Q 05Which inscribed slab, found by French soldiers in Egypt in 1799, gave scholars the key to reading hieroglyphs?
Rosetta Stone
The Rosetta Stone repeats one decree in hieroglyphs, Demotic script and ancient Greek, so the readable Greek unlocked the other two. It went on show at the British Museum in 1802.
Q 06Which novel did Mary Shelley begin after Lord Byron proposed a ghost-story contest beside Lake Geneva?
Frankenstein
Frankenstein came to her as a waking dream several days after the challenge was set. The party was stuck indoors because the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora had brought a cold, rainy summer.
Q 07Which artist, a sculptor who was reluctant to take the job, spent four years painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling?
Michelangelo
Michelangelo suggested that his young rival Raphael be given the commission instead. He saw himself as a carver of marble, yet the ceiling became a cornerstone of High Renaissance art.
Q 08Which Egyptian pharaoh's nearly intact tomb did Howard Carter's team uncover in the Valley of the Kings?
Tutankhamun
Tutankhamun has the only royal tomb in the Valley of the Kings to be found nearly intact. Carter's patron, the Earl of Carnarvon, was close to ending the search and had agreed to pay for one last season.
Q 09Which art movement took its name from a critic's satirical review of a Claude Monet harbour painting?
Impressionism
Impressionism began as a jibe: Louis Leroy mocked Monet's Impression, Sunrise as barely a sketch, and the name stuck to the whole group. His review ran in the Paris paper Le Charivari in 1874.
Q 10Which American port city, home to Congo Square and the Storyville district, is regarded as the birthplace of jazz?
New Orleans
New Orleans heard many of its early players in the bars of Storyville, the red-light district around Basin Street. Visiting tourists spread the music further before the government shut the district in 1917.
Q 11Which tragedy, the longest play Shakespeare wrote, follows a Danish prince avenging his murdered father?
Hamlet
Hamlet hears of the murder from his father's ghost, who names the prince's uncle Claudius as the killer. Claudius has taken both the throne and the dead king's widow.
Q 12Which ancient Greek poet, described as blind in most ancient biographies, is credited with the Iliad and the Odyssey?
Homer
Homer was most often pictured as a blind bard from Ionia, on the coast of present-day Turkey. Scholars still debate whether such a poet existed, and many think the two epics had separate authors.
Q 13Which Dutch painter based The Starry Night on the view from his asylum window at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence?
Vincent van Gogh
Q 21Which Spanish artist painted Guernica in Paris after German and Italian aircraft bombed a Basque town in 1937?
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso left the canvas in the care of New York's Museum of Modern Art, asking that it stay out of Spain until liberty and democracy were restored. It finally reached Madrid in 1981.
Q 22Which English novelist's Pride and Prejudice first appeared credited only to the author of Sense and Sensibility?
Jane Austen
Jane Austen published every one of her novels anonymously, and her first had been signed simply as the work of a Lady. The four that came out in her lifetime brought her little public fame.
Q 23Which Chinese teacher's sayings were compiled by his followers into the Analects, many years after his death?
Confucius
Vincent van Gogh had admitted himself to the asylum, a former monastery, a few weeks before he painted it. The village under the swirling sky is imaginary, added from sketches rather than the real view.
Q 14Which Italian city, home of the Medici banking family, is widely considered the birthplace of the Renaissance?
Florence
Florence grew rich as a trading and banking commune before its artists reshaped European art. The Medici, who were bankers to the pope, ruled the city for periods of its turbulent history.
Q 15Which goldsmith from Mainz printed a celebrated Bible in the 1450s using his new movable-type press?
Johannes Gutenberg
Johannes Gutenberg borrowed from the moneylender Johann Fust to print his Bible, and Fust later demanded the money back. Movable type already existed in East Asia, but his press printed far faster.
Q 16Which religion grew from the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, said to have reached awakening under a tree at Bodh Gaya?
Buddhism
Buddhism dates its beginning to that awakening under a sacred fig, now called the Bodhi Tree. He is said to have spent the next 40 or 45 years teaching everyone from nobles to servants.
Q 17Which Greek philosopher pictured chained prisoners mistaking shadows on a cave wall for reality in his Republic?
Plato
Plato imagines one prisoner set free, who at first turns back in pain to the shadows he is used to. The allegory compares the effect of education with the lack of it.
Q 18Which Salzburg-born composer was writing music at five and later wrote The Marriage of Figaro and The Magic Flute?
Mozart
Mozart played his first little pieces to his father Leopold, who wrote them down for him. An aria from The Magic Flute now travels through space on the Voyager Golden Record.
Q 19Which document did King John of England seal at Runnymede in 1215 to make peace with rebel barons?
Magna Carta
Magna Carta failed as a peace deal: neither side kept its promises and Pope Innocent III annulled it, leading to the First Barons' War. Its name, meaning Great Charter, was only given a few years later.
Q 20Which Titan of Greek myth was chained to a rock by Zeus for stealing fire and giving it to humanity?
Prometheus
Prometheus carried the stolen fire away hidden in a fennel stalk. In the best-known telling, Zeus sent an eagle to eat his liver every day, and it grew back every night.
Confucius won official backing under Emperor Wu of Han, when works linked to him became required reading for would-be officials. They were still on the syllabus when China scrapped its civil service exams in 1905.
Q 24Which temple on the Athenian Acropolis, dedicated to Athena, later served as a church and then a mosque?
Parthenon
The Parthenon came through both conversions basically intact, until 1687, when a Venetian bomb struck the munitions the Ottomans were keeping inside it.
Q 25Which professor at Wittenberg wrote the Ninety-five Theses against indulgences that launched the Protestant Reformation?
Martin Luther
Martin Luther was later hidden away in Wartburg Castle, where he translated the New Testament from Greek into German. He called the refuge his Patmos.
Q 26Which Russian composer wrote the music for the ballets Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker?
Tchaikovsky
Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake opened at Moscow's Bolshoi Theatre in 1877, but most companies now dance the 1895 revival by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov. Its heroine Odette is a princess cursed by a sorcerer.
Q 27French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian all descend from the everyday spoken form of which ancient language?
Latin
Latin as ordinary people spoke it, not the formal written kind, is the ancestor of the whole Romance family. The word Romance itself comes from a phrase meaning to speak in Roman.
Q 28Which pen name did the English writer Eric Blair adopt for Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four?
George Orwell
George Orwell took his surname from the River Orwell in Suffolk, one of his favourite places, and his first name from England's patron saint.
Q 29Which Japanese verse form, mastered by Matsuo Bashō, traditionally has seventeen sound units in three short phrases?
Haiku
Haiku traditionally also carries a seasonal reference and a cutting word that divides the poem. Even Bashō sometimes broke the seventeen-unit pattern.
Q 30Which volcano buried the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum in an eruption witnessed by Pliny the Younger?
Mount Vesuvius
Mount Vesuvius was watched by Pliny from Misenum, across the Bay of Naples, and his two letters are the only surviving eyewitness account. They never mention Pompeii by name.