Iraq Trivia
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53 free Iraq trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Iraq is the land between the rivers where cities, writing, the wheel and written law were invented, where Babylon and Nineveh rose, where the Abbasids built the round City of Peace and the House of Wisdom, and where the last century has brought a British-made monarchy, revolutions, Saddam Hussein, three wars and a hard-won recovery. This Iraq trivia quiz covers all of it. Fifty-three questions run from geography (Baghdad, the Tigris and Euphrates, Basra, the marshes, Cheekha Dar, Kurdistan) through ancient history (Sumer, Uruk, the Ziggurat of Ur, Hammurabi, the Ishtar Gate, Gilgamesh, Hatra) and the Islamic and Ottoman centuries (al-Mansur, Samarra, the Mongols, Suleiman) to the modern state (Faisal I, 1932, the 1958 coup, the Ba'ath, Halabja, Kuwait, 2003, ISIS) and culture and sport (the dinar, the flag, masgouf, the Lions of Mesopotamia). Roughly a third are easy, a third medium, and the rest are for people who really know the region. Every answer has been checked against encyclopaedia and official pages, so the dates, numbers and names are ones you can rely on.
30 of 53 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the capital and largest city of Iraq?
Baghdad
Baghdad was founded in 762 as Madinat al-Salam, the City of Peace, but that official name faded and Baghdad stuck.
Q 02Ancient Mesopotamia lay between which two rivers?
Tigris and Euphrates
Tigris and Euphrates water let farmers grow surplus grain, and that surplus allowed Mesopotamia's early cities to form.
Q 03Which civilisation of southern Mesopotamia is regarded as the earliest known?
Sumer
Sumer faded as a separate people after Amorite invaders conquered Mesopotamia at the start of the second millennium BC.
Q 04Which city was the largest urban centre in Mesopotamia around 3100 BC?
Uruk
Uruk, the Biblical Erech, may have given its name to modern Iraq.
Q 05Which Mesopotamian poem is the world's oldest surviving example of narrative literature?
Epic of Gilgamesh
In the Epic of Gilgamesh the hero finds a plant that renews youth, but a serpent takes it and he goes home still mortal.
Q 06Which British archaeologist led the 1920s–30s excavation of the Great Ziggurat of Ur?
Leonard Woolley
Leonard Woolley directed the joint British Museum and Penn Museum excavation at Ur from 1922 to 1934, clearing the ziggurat and uncovering the Royal Cemetery and its gold treasures.
Q 07Which museum displays the stele bearing the Code of Hammurabi?
The Louvre
The Louvre holds the basalt stele, found at Susa in Iran in 1901, where Elamite invaders had carried it as plunder.
Q 08The Ishtar Gate, with its blue glazed bricks, was ordered by which king?
Nebuchadnezzar II
Nebuchadnezzar II's gate was dug up by Robert Koldewey's German team, and its excavated bricks were rebuilt into the gate in Berlin's Pergamon Museum.
Q 09Which famous phrase sums up the principle behind many punishments in the Code of Hammurabi?
An eye for an eye
An eye for an eye could fall on a family: if a badly built house killed an owner's son, the builder's son was to be put to death.
Q 10Which fortified caravan city in northern Iraq was a temple city in the Parthian era?
Hatra
Hatra's walls turned back Roman sieges under Trajan and Septimius Severus, but the Sasanian king Shapur I took and destroyed the city in 241.
Q 11Which Abbasid caliph founded Iraq's present capital in 762?
Al-Mansur
Al-Mansur let building begin in 762 only after his astrologers declared the date auspicious.
Q 12What was the Abbasid library in the capital, later famed as a Golden Age academy, called?
House of Wisdom
House of Wisdom scholars included al-Khwarizmi, whose Latinized name gave rise to the word algorithm.
Q 13The Great Mosque of Samarra is famous for a 52-metre minaret of what distinctive shape?
A spiral cone
A spiral cone, the Malwiya minaret lost its top in a 2005 blast blamed on insurgents, after reports that US troops had occupied it.
Q 21Who became prime minister after the 14 July Revolution of 1958 overthrew Iraq's monarchy?
Abd al-Karim Qasim
Abd al-Karim Qasim, who led the coup that ended the monarchy, was himself overthrown and killed in a February 1963 coup.
Q 22Which general became Iraq's president in the 1968 Ba'athist coup, and was succeeded by Saddam Hussein in 1979?
Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr
Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr increasingly left the running of government to Saddam, who then replaced him as president.
Q 23The 1975 Algiers Agreement between Saddam and the Shah settled a dispute over which waterway?
Shatt al-Arab
Q 14Who captured and sacked the Abbasid capital in 1258, ending the dynasty's rule in Iraq?
The Mongols
The Mongols under Hulagu took the city in 1258, and its importance waned as power shifted to their new capital, Tabriz.
Q 15Which Ottoman sultan conquered Iraq in 1534?
Suleiman I
Suleiman I's conquest lasted about 90 years: the Safavids then recaptured the old Abbasid capital, and Murad IV won it back only in 1638.
Q 16Harun al-Rashid, the Abbasid caliph, appears as a character in many tales from which story collection?
One Thousand and One Nights
One Thousand and One Nights' tale of Aladdin was not in the Arabic original: it entered the collection in the 18th century via French translator Antoine Galland.
Q 17Which secret 1916 pact carved up Ottoman lands, including what became Iraq and Syria?
Sykes-Picot Agreement
The Sykes-Picot Agreement stayed secret until Russia's new Soviet government published it in late 1917.
Q 18Whom did the British install as king of Iraq on 23 August 1921?
Faisal I
Faisal I had just lost another throne: France invaded his Kingdom of Syria and occupied Damascus in July 1920, forcing him into exile.
Q 19Iraq became independent in 1932 as a kingdom ruled by which Arab dynasty?
Hashemites
The Hashemites ruled Iraq until the 1958 revolution, in which the 23-year-old last king was killed.
Q 20Who ruled Iraq as regent for the boy-king from 1939?
His uncle
His uncle, Abd al-Ilah, was regent until 1953 and was killed alongside the young king in the 1958 revolution.
The Shatt al-Arab was the issue: Saddam gave up some of Iraq's claims to it, and in return Iran stopped backing the Kurdish revolt in Iraq.
Q 24The March 1988 attack on Halabja killed thousands of Kurds with what?
Chemical weapons
Chemical weapons were used on Halabja just after Iranian troops and Kurdish fighters had taken the town, killing thousands of civilians.
Q 25On 2 August 1990 Iraq invaded and annexed which country?
Kuwait
Kuwait was accused of pumping oil over its export quota and stealing oil from a border field, and Saddam wanted his war debt to it cancelled.
Q 26The US-led coalition's 1991 ground offensive against Iraqi forces lasted roughly how long?
100 hours
100 hours in, the coalition halted its ground offensive, and Saddam's forces went on to crush the Kurdish and Shia uprisings that followed.
Q 27What was toppled in Firdos Square on 9 April 2003?
Saddam's statue
Saddam's statue came down only when a Marine vehicle hauled it over, after Iraqis with a sledgehammer and rope could not topple it.
Q 28In which Iraqi city did the Islamic State's leader proclaim a caliphate in July 2014?
Mosul
Mosul fell to the group in June 2014 after Iraqi army units collapsed; its leader then preached from the city's al-Nuri Mosque, and some 500,000 residents fled.
Q 29Which city is the capital of Iraq's Kurdistan Region?
Erbil
Erbil's ancient citadel was emptied of its several hundred families for restoration in 2007, but one family was allowed to stay.
Q 30Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad, abducted by Islamic State in 2014, belongs to which Iraqi religious minority?
Yazidis
Yazidis were targeted by Islamic State: in 2014 its fighters massacred hundreds in Murad's village and took young women like her as slaves.