Lebanon Trivia
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47 free Lebanon trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Lebanon gave the world the alphabet, purple dye and the word for book, holds some of the oldest cities on Earth and the largest Roman temple ever built, and packs 18 recognised religions into a country smaller than Connecticut. It has been the Switzerland and the Paris of the Middle East, then a battlefield, and lately the scene of one of the world's worst financial collapses and one of its biggest explosions. This Lebanon trivia quiz covers all of it. Forty-six questions run from geography (Beirut, Mount Lebanon, Qurnat as Sawda', the Beqaa, the Litani, Jeita Grotto, the cedars) through history (Phoenicia, Byblos, Tyre and Sidon, Baalbek, the Maronites and Druze, Fakhr al-Din, the Mutasarrifate, Greater Lebanon, independence in 1943, the National Pact, the civil war, Taif, Hariri, 2005, 2006, the port explosion) to culture (the flag, the pound, kibbeh, tabbouleh, mezze, arak, Fairuz, Gibran, the diaspora, ski-and-swim days). Roughly a third are easy, a third medium, and the rest are for people who really know the Levant. Every answer has been checked against encyclopaedia and official pages, so the dates, numbers and names are ones you can rely on.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the capital and largest city of Lebanon?
Beirut
Beirut. Banking and tourism made it the 'Paris of the Middle East' in the 1960s, until the civil war that began in 1975 split the city into a Christian east and a Muslim west.
Q 02Which northern port is Lebanon's second-largest city?
Tripoli
Tripoli. Its Greek name means 'three cities': ancient writers say settlers from three Phoenician ports each founded a quarter of their own there, a short walk apart.
Q 03Which invention did the Phoenicians of the Lebanese coast carry across the Mediterranean, where the Greeks adopted it?
The alphabet
The alphabet. Their 22 letters stood for consonants only; the Greeks borrowed the set and added vowels, and the Latin letters used for English descend from that Greek version.
Q 04Which ancient Lebanese port is thought to have given Greek its word for papyrus?
Byblos
Byblos. Egyptian papyrus reached Greece through the port, so the Greeks seem to have named the material after it; 'biblion', a papyrus scroll, later became the word for a book.
Q 05According to the Bible, which king of Tyre supplied timber and craftsmen for Solomon's Temple?
Hiram
Hiram. The Book of Kings has him float the logs down the coast as rafts in return for yearly shipments of wheat and olive oil, and Solomon later hands him twenty towns in Galilee.
Q 06Alexander the Great absorbed the Phoenician city-states after besieging which city in 332 BC?
Tyre
Tyre. The island city held out for seven months until Alexander built a causeway to its walls; silt then gathered around it, which is why Tyre has been joined to the mainland ever since.
Q 07Which Roman general brought the Lebanese coast under Rome's rule in 64 BC?
Pompey
Pompey. His conquest closed three centuries of Hellenistic rule that had begun with Alexander, and Rome and then Byzantium went on to hold the coast for some seven hundred years.
Q 08Baalbek is famous for the ruins of Roman temples dedicated to Bacchus and which other god?
Jupiter
Jupiter. The Romans merged him with Baal, the sky god long worshipped on the site, and built over the older shrine one of the largest temples in their whole empire.
Q 09Roman Berytus, on the coast of modern Lebanon, was famous across the empire for its school of what?
Law
Law. Its jurists helped shape Justinian's great legal code and the city was called the 'mother of laws', until an earthquake and tsunami wrecked it in 551.
Q 10The Druze religion emerged in the 11th century from a branch of what?
Shia Islam
Shia Islam. The faith grew out of its Ismaili branch in Fatimid Cairo around 1017, then shut its doors: the Druze accept no converts, so the only way in is to be born into the community.
Q 11Which Druze emir, executed by the Ottomans in 1635, is remembered as a founder of the Lebanese entity?
Fakhr al-Din II
Fakhr al-Din II. He united most of what is now Lebanon under his own rule and courted Europe with trade and military pacts, even sheltering in Tuscany for a time, before the sultan sent an army to bring him down.
Q 12The Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate of 1861–1918 was created as an autonomous homeland for which community?
Maronite Christians
Maronite Christians, the majority in Mount Lebanon, gained a self-governing district under a Christian governor after the 1860 clashes in which thousands of Christians were killed by the Druze.
Q 13Which disaster of 1915 deepened Mount Lebanon's wartime famine?
Q 21Hezbollah emerged in the early 1980s with financial support and training from which country?
Iran
Iran. Its Revolutionary Guards helped organise and train the group after Israel's invasion of 1982, and Tehran has remained Hezbollah's chief backer ever since.
Q 22Which former Lebanese prime minister was assassinated by a massive bomb in the capital on 14 February 2005?
Rafic Hariri
Rafic Hariri. The billionaire businessman had led post-war rebuilding in two spells as prime minister; his killing set off mass rallies that brought down the government within weeks.
Q 23Who led Hezbollah for over 30 years until an air strike killed him in 2024?
Hassan Nasrallah
A locust plague
A locust plague. An Allied sea blockade and Ottoman requisitions had already emptied the granaries when the swarms arrived and stripped what was left of the crops.
Q 14Greater Lebanon was created in 1920 under which body's mandate system?
League of Nations
The League of Nations. The mandate joined the coastal cities and the eastern farmlands to the old mountain district, drawing the borders that Lebanon still has today.
Q 15Lebanon's Independence Day, 22 November, marks which event of 1943?
Its jailed leaders freed
Its jailed leaders freed: the president and his ministers had been arrested for abolishing the mandate, and an uprising backed by Allied pressure forced the authorities to free them.
Q 16Which Lebanese port city is guarded by a Crusader Sea Castle built on a small island just offshore?
Sidon
Sidon. The city's most famous treasure is no longer there: the carved 'Alexander sarcophagus' dug from its royal cemetery was carried off to Istanbul, where it is still on show.
Q 17Before 1989, Lebanon's parliament seats were split six to five in favour of whom?
Christians
Christians. The ratio came from the 1932 census, which found a slim Christian majority; the peace deal that ended the civil war replaced it with an even split between Christians and Muslims.
Q 18Why has Lebanon not held a national census since 1932?
Sectarian numbers are too sensitive
Sectarian numbers are too sensitive: seats in parliament and the top offices are shared out by religion on the strength of the 1932 figures, and a fresh count could upend the bargain.
Q 19Lebanon's civil war is dated from April 1975, when gunmen ambushed what?
Bus
A bus. Twenty-seven of its mostly Palestinian passengers were killed, the street clashes that followed spread across the country, and the fighting did not formally end until October 1990.
Q 20Which country militarily occupied Lebanon from 1976 to 2005?
Syria
Syria kept troops in Lebanon from its 1976 intervention in the civil war until the mass protests of 2005 forced a withdrawal, completed that April; Israel held a southern zone until 2000.
Hassan Nasrallah. He had run the group since 1992; the 34-day war of 2006 began when his fighters seized two Israeli soldiers in a raid across the border.
Q 24The August 2020 explosion at Lebanon's main port was caused by a neglected stockpile of which chemical?
Ammonium nitrate
Ammonium nitrate. Some 2,750 tonnes of it had sat in a dockside warehouse since being confiscated from a cargo ship in 2014, and the blast brought down the government within days.
Q 25Which Hollywood actor was born in Lebanon's capital in 1964 and raised mostly in Toronto?
Keanu Reeves
Keanu Reeves. His English mother and Hawaiian-born father were living in the city when he arrived, but the family soon moved on and he grew up thousands of miles away in Canada.
Q 26What tree is Lebanon's national emblem, shown in green on its flag?
Cedar
Cedar. The forests that once covered the mountains were cut over thousands of years for ships, temples and palaces, and only scattered groves, such as the Cedars of God near Bsharri, survive.
Q 27On Lebanon's flag, what are the two red stripes commonly said to stand for?
Blood shed for freedom
Blood shed for freedom. Adopted in 1943, the design dropped the foreign tricolour of the mandate years but kept its green tree, now set on a central band that stands for peace and mountain snow.
Q 28The name Lebanon comes from an ancient Semitic root meaning what?
White
White. The root l-b-n probably refers to the snow that caps the mountains for much of the year, though some trace it instead to the pale limestone of their cliffs.
Q 29Lebanon's geography famously lets visitors do which two things in a single day?
Ski and swim in the sea
Ski and swim in the sea. The slopes lie within about 45 minutes' drive of the Mediterranean beaches, and for much of winter and spring both are open on the same day.
Q 30How do visitors tour the lower cave of Lebanon's Jeita Grotto?
By boat
By boat. An underground river fills the lower gallery, so small boats carry visitors along it; the same river supplies drinking water to the capital, 18 km away.