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40 free Indus Valley Civilization trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
The Indus Valley Civilization built planned cities with bathrooms and street drains while most of the world was still in villages, traded by sea with Mesopotamia, and then faded so completely that nobody remembered it until railway engineers started using its ruins in the 1850s. Its script is still unread, its rulers are unknown, and its two most famous statuettes were split between India and Pakistan at Partition. These 40 questions cover the big sites and the small surprises: Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, the Great Bath, the Dancing Girl, the stamp seals and their animals, the measuring systems, the sea trade, the people who dug it all up in the 1920s, and the competing theories about why the cities emptied after 1900 BCE. Dates and superlatives in this field are contested, so the questions stick to the figures on the cited pages and treat decline theories as theories. Play it as a ten-question round, use it for a history class on ancient India and Pakistan, or print it for a quiz night with a strong archaeology table.
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Q 01What use did engineers building the Lahore–Multan railway find for the ruins of Harappa in 1857?
Track ballast
Track ballast for nearly 160 km of line between Multan and Lahore was made from Harappa's ancient bricks, wrecking much of the site before anyone knew its age.
Q 02Which gaming objects, still thrown for luck today, have been dug up at Mohenjo-daro and other Indus sites?
Dice
Dice with one to six holes on their faces were among the Harappans' toys and games, so the six-sided roll predates most written history.
Q 03Starch grains in pots and on teeth at the Indus site of Farmana show which two spices cooked over 4,000 years ago?
Ginger and turmeric
Ginger and turmeric residues make Farmana the earliest known case of a civilisation cooking with spices, 4,500 years before curry had a name.
Q 04In Sindhi, the modern name of Mohenjo-daro, one of the largest Indus Valley cities, has been read to mean what?
Mound of the Dead
Mound of the Dead is a name the city acquired long after it was abandoned; its original name is unknown, and the site was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980.
Q 05Unlike contemporary Egypt and Mesopotamia, Indus Valley cities have yielded no conclusive evidence of which buildings?
Palaces or temples
Palaces or temples are missing even though the Harappans clearly had the engineering skill, suggesting worship happened at home, in small shrines or in the open air.
Q 06At the 1947 Partition, India kept the Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-daro while Pakistan asked for and received which find?
The Priest-King
The Priest-King, a bearded figure in a trefoil-patterned robe, now sits in the National Museum of Pakistan in Karachi, though its royal-priestly title is a modern guess with no real foundation.
Q 07Which fibre, found as textile scraps at Mohenjo-daro, was the Indus region probably the first to cultivate?
Cotton
Cotton of the Old World species Gossypium arboreum was likely first farmed in the Indus Valley, and spindle whorls show it was being spun there in the third millennium BCE.
Q 08Having built no large irrigation works, how did Indus Valley farmers mainly water their fields?
Monsoon floods
Monsoon floods fed the crops, which is why a southward drift of the rains around 1800 BCE could starve the cities without a single battle.
Q 09The horned, cross-legged figure on the Indus Pashupati seal has been claimed as an early form of which Hindu god?
Shiva
Shiva carries the epithet Pashupati, Lord of Animals, and the seal's figure is ringed by an elephant, a tiger, a water buffalo and a rhinoceros, though the identification remains disputed.
Q 10Which stone-built Indus city on Khadir island in the Rann of Kutch stored its water in sixteen or more reservoirs?
Dholavira
Dholavira cut sixteen or more reservoirs, some into living rock, and joined the UNESCO World Heritage list in July 2021 as the Harappan city that built in stone where its cousins used baked clay.
Q 11Which Gujarat site, on an old course of the Sabarmati, has a basin the ASI calls one of the world's earliest docks?
Lothal
Lothal's dock is disputed: marine microfossils and gypsum in the basin point to seawater having filled it, but sceptics call it an irrigation tank and point to an older Egyptian harbour at Wadi al-Jarf.
Q 12Which Haryana village, 150 km from Delhi, yielded the first ancient genome of an Indus Valley person in 2019?
Rakhigarhi
Rakhigarhi's single sequenced skeleton carried no Central Asian steppe ancestry, and after two extra mounds turned up in 2014 the ASI claimed it as the largest Harappan site known.
Q 13Which Rajasthan site on the Ghaggar keeps the world's earliest known ploughed field, furrowed in two directions?
Kalibangan
Q 21Which mythical beast joins bulls, buffaloes and elephants as a stock image on Indus Valley seals?
Unicorn
The unicorn is the one beast on the seals that never existed, and the animal pictures may have helped handlers who could not read tell whose seal was whose, a logo before logos.
Q 22Judging from signs that cramp at one end, in which direction was the undeciphered Indus script generally written?
Right to left
Right to left is one of the very few points scholars agree on, along with the idea that stroke-like signs are numbers; a handful of inscriptions even snake back and forth boustrophedon-style.
Q 23Indus inscriptions are so short that the average text on a seal or tablet runs to roughly how many signs?
5
Kalibangan's field, dated to about 2800 BCE, has furrows 30 cm apart running east-west crossed by others 190 cm apart, a two-crop pattern local farmers still use for mustard and gram.
Q 14Which Balochistan farming site near the Bolan Pass holds the world's oldest evidence of drilled human teeth?
Mehrgarh
Mehrgarh's graveyard gave up eleven drilled molar crowns from nine adults, 7,500 to 9,000 years old, so dentistry in South Asia predates its first cities by millennia.
Q 15Shortugai, an Indus trading post on the Oxus near the lapis lazuli mines, lies in which modern country?
Afghanistan
Afghanistan's Darqad District holds the civilisation's northernmost outpost, planted around 2000 BCE so far from the Indus that it probably doubled as a tin and camel trading post.
Q 16Which site on the Makran coast near Gwadar, close to Iran, is the westernmost known Indus Valley settlement?
Sutkagan Dor
Sutkagan Dor sits about 480 km west of Karachi on the Dasht River, the last stop on a coastal route that ran from Gujarat's ports along the Arabian Sea.
Q 17What did Mesopotamian texts most likely call the Indus region, whose ships one Akkadian king boasted moored at his quay?
Meluhha
Meluhha supplied timber, ivory and beads to Mesopotamia, and an Akkadian seal names one Shu-ilishu as an interpreter of its language, proof the two peoples could not understand each other.
Q 18Indus traders dealt through middlemen from Dilmun, a Persian Gulf hub centred on which modern Gulf state?
Bahrain
Bahrain, with Failaka and the nearby Arabian coast, made up Dilmun, whose merchants handled much of the sea trade between the Indus and Mesopotamia from the middle Harappan phase.
Q 19Etched beads of which red-orange stone, a Harappan speciality, were buried in the tombs of Ur around 2500 BCE?
Carnelian
Carnelian beads were bleached with a white design by painting on an alkali and heating them, a technique the Harappans developed, which is how archaeologists can trace them from the Indus to Mesopotamian graves.
Q 20The square seals of the Indus cities, engraved with animals and script, were mostly cut from which soft stone?
Steatite
Steatite, or soapstone, is soft enough to carve with simple tools, and thousands of these little stamps survive while almost nothing they once sealed does.
About five signs per inscription, with over 400 distinct signs in play, leaves decipherers with no bilingual text and no long passage to test a reading against.
Q 24Asko Parpola, Iravatham Mahadevan and Yuri Knorozov all argued the Indus script encodes a language of which family?
Dravidian
Dravidian, the family of Tamil and Telugu, is the leading candidate, partly because Brahui, a Dravidian tongue, survives today in Balochistan next door to the old Indus heartland.
Q 25In 2025 the chief minister of which Indian state offered a $1 million prize to anyone who deciphers the Indus script?
Tamil Nadu
Tamil Nadu's M. K. Stalin put up the money a century after the script came to light, and the state's interest is not idle: many Tamil scholars hold that the script hides an ancestor of their own language family.
Q 26The Great Bath of Mohenjo-daro, called the earliest public water tank anywhere, was made watertight with what?
Bitumen
Bitumen, a natural tar, was laid in a thick layer along the sides and probably the floor of the 12-by-7-metre pool, which sits on the citadel mound and drops to 2.4 metres deep.
Q 27Following an archaeological convention, the Indus Valley Civilisation's other name, Harappan, honours Harappa as what?
Its first excavated site
Its first excavated site gives a culture its label, the type site, and the Archaeological Survey of India leaned on the name Harappan after 1947 once the Indus itself lay mostly in Pakistan.
Q 28Mortimer Wheeler's 1953 theory, now largely abandoned, blamed the fall of the Indus cities on what?
An Aryan invasion
An Aryan invasion from Central Asia was Wheeler's reading of 37 skeletons found at Mohenjo-daro, yet their skull marks later proved to be erosion, and most scholars now blame drought and collapsing trade.
Q 29The mega-drought about 4,200 years ago that may have doomed the Indus cities marks the start of which geological age?
Meghalayan
The Meghalayan Age, the current stage of the Holocene, is named for a cave stalagmite in India's Meghalaya state, so the climate shock that emptied the Indus now defines our own slice of time.
Q 30What does recent geophysical research say happened to the rain-fed Ghaggar-Hakra about 4,000 years ago?
It shrank to a seasonal river
It shrank to a seasonal river as the rains weakened, pulling its reach back up to the Himalayan foothills just as the Indus cities along its banks began to empty.