Libya Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
49 free Libya trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Libya has the longest Mediterranean coastline in Africa, some of the best-preserved Roman ruins anywhere, a Greek Pentapolis, a Roman emperor to its name, and a desert that once claimed the world's hottest temperature. It fought the young United States in the Barbary Wars, produced a resistance hero played by Anthony Quinn, and was ruled for 42 years by a colonel with a Green Book and a plain green flag. This Libya trivia quiz covers all of it. Forty-three questions run from geography (Tripoli, Benghazi, the Sahara, Bikku Bitti, Ghadames, the Acacus rock art, the Nubian aquifer) through history (the Phoenicians and Greeks, Leptis Magna and Septimius Severus, the Karamanlis and the Barbary Wars, Italian conquest, Omar Mukhtar, King Idris and 1951, oil in 1959, Gaddafi's coup, the Jamahiriya, Lockerbie, the 2011 uprising and Sirte, the divided state, Storm Daniel) to culture and economy (the flag, the dinar, Arabic and Berber, bazin and couscous, the Great Man-Made River, oil reserves). Roughly a third are easy, a third medium, and the rest are for people who really know North Africa. Every answer has been checked against encyclopaedia and official pages, so the dates, numbers and names are ones you can rely on.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which 1985 hit film do Libyan terrorists gun down a scientist who cheated them out of their plutonium?
Back to the Future
Back to the Future: Doc Brown swindled the Libyans out of the plutonium that powers his DeLorean, and their revenge attack is what sends Marty racing back to 1955.
Q 02Tripoli's name comes from the Greek for 'three cities': Oea, Sabratha and which other?
Leptis Magna
Leptis Magna: after it was abandoned, dunes buried it for centuries, which is why its ruins, dug out in the 1920s, rank among the best-preserved Roman cities anywhere.
Q 03Which of these countries is larger than Libya, Africa's fourth-largest?
Algeria
Algeria has been Africa's largest country since Sudan split in two in 2011; Libya, at almost 1.8 million square kilometres, is about two and a half times the size of Texas.
Q 04Gaddafi drew a 'Line of Death' across the mouth of which gulf, daring the US Navy to cross it?
Gulf of Sidra
Gulf of Sidra: Washington treated most of it as international waters and kept sailing across the line, and in 1981 US Navy jets shot down two Libyan fighters there.
Q 05Which Roman emperor, born in Libya's greatest Roman city, expanded it into one of North Africa's finest?
Septimius Severus
Septimius Severus ended his days about as far from home as the empire reached: after invading Scotland he fell ill and died at York in 211.
Q 06Which man from Cyrene, in eastern Libya, was made to carry Jesus's cross in the Gospels?
Simon
Simon: his home city gave eastern Libya the name Cyrenaica and grew rich on silphium, a medicinal plant that appeared on its coins and is said to have died out in Roman times.
Q 07In 1551 the Ottomans took Tripoli from which order of knights?
Knights of St John
Knights of St John: Spain had captured the city in 1510 and handed it to the order along with Malta, and the corsair Dragut, who helped storm it, went on to rule there as an Ottoman governor.
Q 08Which German general landed at Tripoli in February 1941?
Erwin Rommel
Erwin Rommel was sent only to shore up Italy's beaten army and told to hold a defensive line, but within six weeks he attacked instead and won the nickname 'the Desert Fox'.
Q 09Libya's Barbary corsairs fought which country in the First Barbary War of 1801 to 1805?
United States
United States: President Jefferson refused to pay Tripoli tribute for safe passage, and the campaign that followed is remembered in the Marines' Hymn line 'to the shores of Tripoli'.
Q 10Italy's 1911 invasion of Libya saw the first use in war of which tactic?
Aeroplane bombing
Aeroplane bombing: the pilot Giulio Gavotti leaned out of his monoplane and dropped four grenades by hand onto Ottoman positions, having told his father he hoped to be the first to try it.
Q 11Which resistance leader, hanged by the Italians in 1931, is honoured as Libya's national hero?
Omar Mukhtar
Omar Mukhtar, a Koran teacher turned guerrilla leader, fought for nearly twenty years and was hanged at 73; Anthony Quinn played him in Lion of the Desert, a film Italy banned in 1982.
Q 12What was the Lady Be Good, found almost intact in the Libyan desert in 1958, fifteen years after it vanished?
An American bomber
An American bomber: on its first mission the crew flew past their base in a sandstorm, bailed out when the fuel ran dry, and died trying to walk out of the desert, 440 miles inland.
Q 13Libya became independent in 1951 under a resolution passed by which international body?
Q 21Which US president ordered air strikes on Libya over a West Berlin disco attack?
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan, who called Gaddafi the 'mad dog of the Middle East', sent the aircraft ten days after the 1986 blast; France and Spain refused to let them fly overhead.
Q 22Libya's 2011 uprising broke out within a week of which neighbouring president's fall?
Hosni Mubarak
Hosni Mubarak: Egypt's president quit on 11 February as the Arab Spring spread, protests began in eastern Libya four days later, and within eight months the revolt had ended Gaddafi's 42 years in power.
Q 23In March 2011 UN Security Council Resolution 1973 imposed what over Libya?
No-fly zone
United Nations
United Nations: with Britain and France running the former Italian colony, the General Assembly ruled in 1949 that it must be independent by the start of 1952, and King Idris proclaimed it with a week to spare.
Q 14King Idris I was the leader of which Islamic religious brotherhood, founded by his grandfather?
The Senussi
The Senussi: the order won over the desert Bedouin, joined the armed resistance to Italian rule and supplied Libya's only king, whose fall in 1969 ended the monarchy.
Q 15The last phase of Libya's 1980s war with Chad is named after which make of vehicle, driven by the Chadians?
Toyota
Toyota: Chadian fighters in fast pickup trucks armed with anti-tank missiles routed Libya's tank columns in 1987, costing it, by American estimates, about a tenth of its army.
Q 16The young officers who overthrew Libya's King Idris in 1969 took which Arab leader as their hero?
Gamal Abdel Nasser
Gamal Abdel Nasser: the plotters called themselves the Free Officers, after the group that brought Egypt's president to power, though Nasser privately judged Gaddafi 'a nice boy, but terribly naive'.
Q 17In March 1977 Gaddafi declared Libya to be what form of state?
Jamahiriya
Jamahiriya, a word Gaddafi coined, usually rendered 'state of the masses': on paper the people ruled through local congresses, and he soon gave up his formal leadership of the government, yet he stayed in charge for 34 more years.
Q 18Until 2011, Libya's flag was unique in the world for what reason?
It was plain green with no design
It was plain green with no design: Gaddafi adopted it in 1977, and the rebels of 2011 fought instead under the red, black and green flag of the old kingdom, which became the national flag again that August.
Q 19Gaddafi ruled Libya for four decades at which army rank?
Colonel
Colonel: a junior officer of 27 when he seized power, he took that one promotion after the coup and kept the rank for life, even while insisting he held no office at all.
Q 20The 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, blamed on Libyan agents, took place over which Scottish town?
Lockerbie
Lockerbie: eleven townspeople died along with all 259 people on board, and the one man convicted, a Libyan agent, was freed on compassionate grounds in 2009 and flew home to a hero's welcome.
No-fly zone: Russia and China abstained and let it pass, and its licence for 'all necessary measures' to protect civilians became the basis for months of NATO air strikes.
Q 24Gaddafi was captured and killed on 20 October 2011 in which Libyan city, his home town?
Sirte
Sirte: he had fled there when the capital fell, and after a NATO strike stopped his convoy as it tried to break out, rebel fighters dragged him from a drainage pipe.
Q 25From 2014 Libya's rival governments were based in Tripoli and which other city?
Tobruk
Tobruk, the port famous for its 1941 siege: the elected parliament fled there when militias took over the capital, and for want of housing its members first lived and met on a chartered Greek car ferry.
Q 26Which Libyan field marshal launched 'Operation Flood of Dignity' against the Tripoli government in April 2019?
Khalifa Haftar
Khalifa Haftar helped Gaddafi seize power in 1969, was captured while fighting in Chad, turned against him and spent nearly twenty years in exile in Virginia before returning in 2011.
Q 27Storm Daniel's floods of September 2023 devastated which Libyan port city after two dams failed?
Derna
Derna: the two dams above the city, built in the 1970s, had shown cracks as early as 1998 and gone years without repair, and when they burst in the night whole neighbourhoods were swept into the sea.
Q 28On official trips abroad, Gaddafi famously brought along and stayed in what?
A Bedouin tent
A Bedouin tent: it went with him to Europe and America, where the one pitched on an estate owned by Donald Trump in New York State had to be hastily taken down over zoning rules.
Q 29Libya's 'Aziziya held the world heat record, 58 °C from 1922, until what happened?
The WMO invalidated it in 2012
The WMO invalidated it in 2012: investigators concluded that an untrained observer had misread the thermometer by about 7 °C, which handed the record back to the 56.7 °C logged in Death Valley in 1913.
Q 30Libya's Great Man-Made River, a vast network of pipes, pumps its water from which source?
The Nubian Sandstone Aquifer
The Nubian Sandstone Aquifer: drilling in the 1950s revealed its 'fossil' water, some of it 40,000 years old, and because none of it is being replaced the pipes are draining a one-time supply.