Mesopotamia Trivia
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118 free Mesopotamia trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Mesopotamia is where writing, cities, empires and written law all show up first, so a good Mesopotamia quiz is really a quiz on the beginnings of everything. This one moves from the Greek roots of the name and the two rivers that define the land through Sumer and its language isolate, the wedge-shaped script and the half-million tablets it left behind, and on to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Code of Hammurabi and the ziggurats. You will meet Sargon of Akkad and his god-king grandson, Enheduanna the first named author, Nebuchadnezzar II's blue Ishtar Gate and the disputed Hanging Gardens, Ashurbanipal's library and lion hunts, the sack of Nineveh, the Standard and Royal Game of Ur, the Sumerian King List's 241,200-year reigns and Cyrus's conquest of Babylon in 539 BC. Easy questions suit anyone who remembers a school unit on the Fertile Crescent; the expert tier asks for scribes' names and excavation dates. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the region, its cities, texts and artefacts, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. If you enjoy this, try our quizzes on ancient Egypt and ancient Greece.
30 of 118 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which two rivers frame the historical region of Mesopotamia?
Tigris and Euphrates
Tigris and Euphrates: farmers along them grew such a surplus of grain that people could settle in cities.
Q 02What were most of the earliest Mesopotamian written records used for?
Keeping accounts
Keeping accounts: as cities grew, their institutions needed records of the goods going into and out of their stores.
Q 03Which explorer built a reed boat in Iraq in 1977 to test whether ancient Mesopotamians could have traded by sea?
Thor Heyerdahl
Thor Heyerdahl: after about five months at sea, he burned the boat in Djibouti in protest at the wars raging around the Red Sea.
Q 04How do linguists classify Sumerian?
A language isolate
A language isolate: even after Akkadian replaced Sumerian in everyday speech, scribes kept writing it for religion and learning.
Q 05What is the name of the earliest known writing system, developed to write Sumerian?
Cuneiform
It stayed in active use from the early Bronze Age until the 1st century BC and was adapted for Akkadian, Hittite, Elamite and more.
Q 06Mesopotamia's ancient script takes its modern name from a Latin word meaning what?
Wedge
Wedge: scribes pressed a cut stylus into soft clay, leaving wedge-shaped marks that gave the script its Latin-based name.
Q 07Local legend in al-Qurnah, a town in southern Iraq, says it stands on the site of which biblical place?
Eden
Eden: locals show visitors an old tree there as the Tree of Knowledge.
Q 08What were Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego thrown into for refusing to worship Nebuchadnezzar's golden statue?
A fiery furnace
A fiery furnace: the king then saw a fourth figure walking with them in the flames, and all three came out unharmed.
Q 09The trilingual Behistun Inscription was commissioned by kings of which empire?
Achaemenid
Achaemenid: Darius had it carved so high on the cliff that Henry Rawlinson needed a local boy's help to climb up and copy its Old Persian text.
Q 10What was the name of the wild man the gods created to stop Gilgamesh from oppressing his people?
Enkidu
Enkidu: after a fierce wrestling match, he and Gilgamesh became best friends and set off on adventures together.
Q 11Who guards the Cedar Forest that Gilgamesh and his companion journey to?
Humbaba
Humbaba: the gods later ruled that one of the two heroes must die, partly for killing him and felling the cedar.
Q 12What does the goddess Ishtar send to punish Gilgamesh for spurning her advances?
The Bull of Heaven
The Bull of Heaven: after the pair killed it, one of them tore off its hindquarter and flung it in the goddess's face.
Q 13Who is the flood survivor Gilgamesh seeks out to learn the secret of eternal life?
Utnapishtim
Utnapishtim: he challenged Gilgamesh to stay awake for six days and seven nights, and Gilgamesh fell asleep almost at once.
Q 21Which museum acquired the original stele of Hammurabi's law code?
The Louvre
The Louvre got it from the dig itself: a French archaeological mission led by Jacques de Morgan found the stele broken into large pieces.
Q 22Which god is shown with Hammurabi in the relief at the top of his stele?
Shamash
Shamash, the sun god and god of justice, sits enthroned before the king, a scene meant to present the laws below as backed by the gods.
Q 23The 'eye for an eye' principle scholars identified in Hammurabi's laws is known by what Latin name?
Lex talionis
Lex talionis applied between equals: putting out a gentleman's eye cost an eye, but putting out a commoner's eye cost only a fine.
Q 14What creature steals the plant of rejuvenation while Gilgamesh stops to bathe?
A snake
A snake: it slipped away with the plant, shedding its skin as it went, and Gilgamesh was left with no hope of renewed youth.
Q 15Which US craft-store chain bought a Gilgamesh tablet that federal officials later seized from the Museum of the Bible?
Hobby Lobby
Hobby Lobby paid $1.6 million for the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet in 2014, but prosecutors said it had been imported illegally and had it forfeited.
Q 16The oldest known written customer complaint, a clay tablet from Ur, scolds the merchant Ea-nasir for selling poor-quality what?
Copper
Copper ingots were the problem: Nanni wrote that Ea-nasir had treated his messengers with contempt and sent them back empty-handed, without his money.
Q 17Which Assyriologist read the Gilgamesh flood story to a biblical society?
George Smith
George Smith, a self-taught scholar, reportedly leapt up and began undressing when he realized what the tablet described.
Q 18Which Star Trek captain retells the Epic of Gilgamesh to a dying alien who speaks in allegories?
Jean-Luc Picard
Jean-Luc Picard tells the tale to the Tamarian captain Dathon after the two fight a beast together, and Dathon dies listening.
Q 19The stele bearing the Code of Hammurabi is carved from which stone?
Basalt
Basalt carried the laws in public, and the epilogue urges any wronged man with a lawsuit to have the stele's words explained so he can learn his rights.
Q 20At which site in present-day Iran was the Hammurabi stele rediscovered?
Susa
Susa was an Elamite city, and the Elamite king Shutruk-Nakhunte is thought to have carried the stele there as war booty.
Q 24Under Hammurabi's laws, if a badly built house collapsed and killed its owner, what happened to the builder?
Executed
Executed: and if the collapse killed the owner's son instead, the builder's own son was executed.
Q 25Which king commissioned the Great Ziggurat of Ur in the 21st century BC?
Ur-Nammu
Ur-Nammu is credited with the oldest surviving law code, though some scholars credit his son, and it set silver fines for injuries where Hammurabi's later laws took an eye for an eye.
Q 26Which deity was the patron of Ur and its great ziggurat?
The moon god Nanna
The moon god Nanna's wife Ningal, in the Lament for Ur, weeps and pleads for the city, yet the gods' storm destroys it anyway.
Q 27Etemenanki, the great ziggurat that Nebuchadnezzar II rebuilt, is linked by scholars to which biblical story?
Tower of Babel
Tower of Babel is the story it may have inspired, and Herodotus later described the tower, though he probably never saw it himself.
Q 28Who founded the Akkadian Empire, often called the first empire in world history?
Sargon
Sargon, by a later legend, was set adrift as a baby in a basket of rushes and rose from royal cup-bearer to emperor.
Q 29The Babylonian tablet Plimpton 322 lists numbers fitting which famous rule, a thousand years before its Greek namesake?
The Pythagorean theorem
The Pythagorean theorem's number triples fill its rows, a sign that Babylonian scribes knew the rule for right triangles long before Pythagoras lived.
Q 30Enheduanna, an Akkadian high priestess at Ur, is history's earliest known named what?
Author
Author of hymns in which she names herself, Enheduanna still divides scholars, some of whom doubt she composed the works credited to her.