Indus Valley Civilization Trivia
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90 free Indus Valley Civilization trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 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 90 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.
30 of 90 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
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, found alongside garlic, were the makings of what the researchers called a proto-curry, cooked about 4,500 years ago and some 4,000 years before Europeans coined the word curry.
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 06When Mohenjo-daro's finds were divided after Partition, India kept the Dancing Girl while Pakistan asked for and received which find?
The Priest-King
The Priest-King, a bearded figure in a trefoil-patterned robe, was returned to Pakistan only after the 1972 Simla Agreement. Its royal-priestly title is a modern guess that scholars call without 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 probably first farmed in the Indus region, and cotton cloth is thought to have been among the goods its merchants shipped west to the Gulf.
Q 08A 2012 study concluded that Indus Valley farmers relied mainly on what to water their fields?
Monsoon floods
Monsoon floods fed the crops, the study argued, so as the rains slowly weakened, the harvest surpluses that supported the cities shrank and people moved away to small farms.
Q 09A horned figure seated among wild animals on a famous Mohenjo-daro seal has been claimed as which Hindu god?
Shiva
Shiva carries the epithet Pashupati, Lord of Animals, which gave the Pashupati seal its name; the 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 stands on an arid island with no steady river, so its builders dammed two seasonal streams and led the runoff into reservoirs around the city, some of them cut into solid rock.
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 most common image on the seals, always shown in profile, and small terracotta figures with a single horn suggest the carvers meant a one-horned beast, not a bull seen side-on.
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 23Which kind of text, the key the Rosetta Stone gave for Egyptian, do decipherers of the Indus script lack?
Kalibangan's field has furrows 30 cm apart running east-west crossed by others 190 cm apart, a grid that local farmers still use to grow mustard and gram together.
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 16Sutkagan Dor, the westernmost known Indus settlement, sits on the Makran coast close to which modern country's border?
Iran
Iran's border lies just beyond the site, about 480 km west of Karachi, which marked the far end of a coastal trade route running from the Indus ports of Gujarat.
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 and beads to Mesopotamia, and an Akkadian seal names one Shu-ilishu as an interpreter of its language, a sign the two peoples could not understand each other.
Q 18Indus traders dealt through middlemen from Dilmun, a Persian Gulf hub centred on which modern country?
Bahrain
Bahrain was the heart of Dilmun, whose merchants carried much of the trade between the Indus and Mesopotamia; the weights used there matched the Indus standard, not the Mesopotamian one.
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.
A bilingual inscription
A bilingual inscription has never turned up, and the texts are tiny, about five signs on average, so decipherers have no parallel 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 is a favoured candidate, partly because Brahui, a Dravidian language, is spoken to this day in Balochistan, right beside 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 made the offer just after a study reported that many of the graffiti signs scratched on ancient pottery from his own state closely resemble those of the Indus script.
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 behind the pool's close-fitted brickwork, and most scholars think the bath served religious rites of purification, not everyday washing.
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 became the type site, the place a culture is named after, although Harappa's importance only became clear once Mohenjo-daro was dug a few years later.
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, but they dated from after the city was abandoned and the marks on their skulls proved to be erosion.
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 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.