Maya Civilization Trivia
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120 free Maya Civilization trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Maya trivia quiz covers the ancient civilization of southern Mexico and Central America from its first villages to the last city to fall to Spain. The easy questions are the ones every history fan can answer: which countries the Maya region spans, the staple crops, the pyramid at Chichen Itza and the famous calendar. From there it moves into the details that make the Maya so fascinating: a writing system of around 500 glyphs, a base-20 number system with a shell for zero, and a 260-day ritual count that may be based on human gestation. The harder end is for archaeology buffs and pub-quiz specialists: the Teotihuacan takeover of Tikal in 378, the Tikal-Calakmul rivalry, the beheaded king of Copan, Pakal's 68-year reign and hidden tomb, the four surviving codices, the Venus tables, the Hero Twins of the Popol Vuh, the bishop who burned the books, the Soviet linguist who cracked the glyphs and the Star Wars connection at Tikal. Modern Maya peoples get a look-in too. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the civilization, its cities and its texts before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Aztec, ancient Egypt and Inca quizzes next.
30 of 120 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Maya region covers all of Guatemala and Belize plus parts of which other three countries?
Mexico, Honduras and El Salvador
Their descendants today number well over 6 million and speak more than 28 surviving Mayan languages.
Q 02The modern term Maya is derived from the name of which city?
Mayapan
Maya peoples never had a sense of common ethnic identity for most of their history.
Q 03Which three crops were the basic staples of the Maya diet?
Maize, beans and squashes
Cacao was a prestige crop, prized by the elite as a chocolate drink.
Q 04Around what date did the first Maya cities develop?
750 BC
By 500 BC they had monumental architecture with elaborate stucco facades.
Q 05The Classic period of Maya civilization is defined by dated monuments using which calendar?
The Long Count
It ran roughly from 250 to 900 AD and marked the peak of large-scale construction.
Q 06Which distant central Mexican metropolis intervened at Tikal in AD 378 and installed a new dynasty?
Teotihuacan
The takeover was led by Siyaj K'ak', Born of Fire, and Tikal's king died the same day.
Q 07Which powerful city was Tikal's great rival in the Peten Basin during the Classic period?
Calakmul
Both built networks of allies and vassals and traded strategic victories over the centuries.
Q 08What happened to Copan's king Uaxaclajuun Ub'aah K'awiil in 738?
He was captured and beheaded by a vassal
His captor, the king of Quirigua, was probably backed by Calakmul to weaken an ally of Tikal.
Q 09Roughly how many people lived in the largest Classic-period Maya cities?
50,000 to 120,000
The political landscape has been compared to Renaissance Italy or Classical Greece.
Q 10In which century did the central Maya region suffer the major political collapse that emptied its cities?
The 9th
Warfare, overpopulation, environmental degradation and drought are the usual suspects.
Q 11Which two northern cities showed increased activity during the Terminal Classic as the south collapsed?
Chichen Itza and Uxmal
Cities of the northern Yucatan were inhabited long after the southern lowlands stopped raising monuments.
Q 12Around which year was the last dominant Postclassic capital of Yucatan abandoned?
1448
Its fall began a long era of warfare and disease that only subsided shortly before Spanish contact.
Q 13Which conquistador did Cortés send to Guatemala in 1523 to take the K'iche' capital?
Pedro de Alvarado
He arrived with 180 cavalry, 300 infantry, four cannons and thousands of central Mexican allies.
Q 21How long is the Dresden Codex when its accordion-folded pages are fully opened?
3.7 metres
It suffered serious water damage during World War II and is kept in the Saxon State Library.
Q 22What was the Maya term for a scribe, meaning one who writes or paints?
Aj tz'ib
Jasaw Chan K'awiil I, king of Tikal, was buried with his paint pot.
Q 23The Maya number system was vigesimal, meaning it counted in groups of what?
20
A dot stood for one and a bar for five, with a shell for zero by the Postclassic.
Q 24What symbol represented zero in Maya numerals by the Postclassic period?
Q 14In which year did Nojpeten, the last independent Maya city, fall to the Spanish?
1697
That was more than 170 years after the fall of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan.
Q 15Which American writer and English artist toured Maya ruins from 1839, bringing them to world attention?
Stephens and Catherwood
Their illustrated accounts sparked strong popular interest in the ruins.
Q 16Which Mayanist promoted the discredited 1960s idea that Maya cities were vacant centres run by peaceful priests?
J. Eric S. Thompson
Decipherment of the script later revealed the warlike activities of Classic Maya kings.
Q 17Which Soviet linguist argued in 1952 that de Landa's Maya 'alphabet' was actually syllabic?
Yuri Knorozov
By the end of the 20th century scholars could read the majority of Maya texts.
Q 18Roughly how many glyphs were in use in the Maya script at any one time?
About 500
Some 200 of them, including variations, were phonetic.
Q 19As of 2025, how many uncontested pre-Columbian Maya books were known to survive?
Four
They are the Madrid, Dresden and Paris codices and the Maya Codex of Mexico, formerly the Grolier Codex.
Q 20The paper of Maya codices was made from the pounded inner bark of which tree?
Wild fig
The Maya word hu'un for this bark paper became semantically equivalent to book.
A shell
The earliest explicit use of zero on a Maya monument dates to 357 AD.
Q 25How many days were in the tzolk'in, the basic cycle of Maya ceremony and prophecy?
260
It may be based on the human gestation period, and was used to record birth dates.
Q 26In the 365-day haab, what was the dangerous 5-day period at the end of the year called?
Wayeb
It was a time when the barriers between mortal and supernatural realms broke down.
Q 27A Maya tun of 360 days was made of 18 winals of how many days each?
20
Multiplying by 18 rather than 20 gave a rough approximation of the solar year.
Q 28The Maya non-repeating calendar begins with the current world's creation in which year?
3114 BC
The start was the end of a previous cycle of bak'tuns.
Q 29With what error did the Maya measure the 584-day cycle of Venus?
Two hours
Five Venus cycles equal eight 365-day years, a relationship recorded in the codices.
Q 30Which planet's glyph was incorporated into the Maya hieroglyph meaning war?
Venus
Its heliacal rising was associated with destruction and upheaval.