Mummies
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49 free Mummies trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Mummies are not only Egyptian. The oldest deliberately prepared ones come from the Chilean desert, the best-preserved lies in a Han tomb in China, a Copper Age man with 61 tattoos came out of an Alpine glacier, and Iron Age bodies keep surfacing from Danish bogs with the noose still on. Europe ground Egyptian mummies into medicine and paint for centuries, shipped 180,000 mummified cats to Britain as fertiliser, and unwrapped them at parties. These 49 questions cover the whole field: the Persian root of the word, natron and the 70 days, the brain through the nose, the heart left in place, the four canopic jars and the sons of Horus, Anubis, Herodotus, the Turin mummy that pushed embalming back 1,500 years, Howard Carter's 'wonderful things', the first mummy X-ray, Lord Carnarvon's mosquito, Ramesses II's military welcome in Paris, Ötzi, Tollund Man, Lindow Man, Lady Dai at Mawangdui, the Tarim mummies, the Children of Llullaillaco, Juanita, Guanajuato, Rosalia Lombardo, Lenin, mummy brown, mummia, 'Mummy' Pettigrew, mummy wasps and the Tenerife congress. Easy questions stick to Tutankhamun and Anubis; the hardest ask about Thutmose IV, Alfred Lucas and Nicolaus Rungius. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss. Play it solo or print it for a Halloween or ancient history round.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01'Mummy' comes from a word for which black substance, once thought to coat the bodies?
Asphalt
Asphalt. Medieval writers believed Egypt's blackened bodies had been embalmed with it, so the name of the tar passed to the corpses themselves.
Q 02Egypt's sacred Apis, kept in a temple at Memphis and mummified when it died, was which animal?
A bull
A bull. Priests picked each Apis by its markings; when one died it was embalmed, and the later bulls were laid in giant stone sarcophagi in the tunnels of the Serapeum at Saqqara.
Q 03In 1890, a shipload of Egyptian mummies was sold in England as fertilizer; most were mummies of which animal?
Cats
Cats. Egyptians had offered them to the gods by the thousand, and Victorian merchants saw the bodies as cheap fertilizer for English fields.
Q 04The Chinchorro mummies, far older than Egypt's, are a World Heritage Site on the Pacific coast of which country?
Chile
Chile. The Chinchorro, a fishing people of the Atacama coast, mummified children and babies as well as adults, rebuilding each body with sticks, reeds and clay.
Q 05What let a Nevada tribe reclaim Spirit Cave Man, North America's oldest mummy?
A genome study
A genome study. Officials had disputed his ancestry, but DNA showed the man, who lived more than 10,000 years ago, was related to today's Native Americans, and he was handed back in 2016.
Q 06Whose Histories give one of the most detailed ancient accounts of Egyptian mummification?
Herodotus
Herodotus. He describes embalmers showing families painted wooden models of corpses, so they could choose among three grades of treatment at three prices.
Q 07Egyptian embalmers dried the body in which naturally occurring salt?
Natron
Natron. Egyptians gathered the salt from dry lake beds, and its name lives on in chemistry: sodium's symbol, Na, comes from natrium.
Q 08Which organ did Egyptian embalmers deliberately leave inside the body?
The heart
The heart. Egyptians believed it, not the brain, held a person's intelligence and character, so it had to stay with the body for the afterlife.
Q 09Egyptian embalmers broke up the brain with a rod and drained it out through which part of the head?
The nose
The nose. A stick left behind in one skull suggests embalmers stirred the brain to a liquid and let it drain out, not just hooked it out in pieces as ancient writers said.
Q 10Egyptian embalmers sealed a body's organs in four of which vessels?
Canopic jars
Canopic jars. Later embalmers put the wrapped organs back inside the body, yet families still buried a set of jars: solid dummies with no hollow at all.
Q 11The lids of the vessels holding a mummy's organs were carved as the heads of which Egyptian god's four sons?
Horus
Horus. Earlier lids were carved as human heads; only later did three of his sons take the faces of a baboon, a jackal and a falcon.
Q 12Which jackal-headed Egyptian god was the patron of embalming?
Anubis
Anubis. In myth he invented embalming itself, first practising the art on the body of the murdered god Osiris.
Q 13Tests in 2018 showed a mummy in which Italian city had been deliberately embalmed 5,600 years ago?
Turin
Turin. Its Egyptian Museum holds the prehistoric body, embalmed with conifer resin and plant extracts about a thousand years before the Great Pyramid, far earlier than experts had believed possible.
Q 21Who stumbled on Ötzi the Iceman, high in the Alps, in 1991?
German hikers
German hikers. Erika and Helmut Simon saw a body sticking out of the ice and, like the police, took it for a mountaineer who had died in a recent accident.
Q 22What were Ötzi the Iceman's 61 tattoos probably for?
Pain relief
Pain relief. They cluster over his worn joints and lower back, where clothes hid them, and many lie on lines still used in acupuncture.
Q 23What evidence suggests Ötzi was murdered?
An arrowhead in his shoulder
An arrowhead in his shoulder. Nobody noticed it for ten years; later examinations showed the flint had torn an artery, and he most likely bled to death.
Q 14Who led the 1922 excavation that found Tutankhamun's tomb?
Howard Carter
Howard Carter. The first step lay under the ruins of ancient workmen's huts he had left alone in earlier seasons, just below the entrance to another pharaoh's tomb.
Q 15Asked 'Can you see anything?' as he first peered into Tutankhamun's tomb, what did its discoverer famously reply?
'Wonderful things'
'Wonderful things' is the polished line from his published account, which gives it as 'Yes, wonderful things'; his own journal for that day records the plainer 'Yes, it is wonderful.'
Q 16In 1903, anatomists studied the mummy of the pharaoh Thutmose IV without damaging it by using which new technology?
X-ray imaging
X-ray imaging. The rays were only eight years old, and anatomist Grafton Elliot Smith wanted them for the other royal mummies too but never managed to arrange it.
Q 17What modern technique lets researchers see inside a mummy's bandages in 3-D without touching them?
CT scanning
CT scanning. A 2005 scan of Tutankhamun found a badly broken left leg, suggesting that an injury, not the long-suspected blow to the head, lay behind his early death.
Q 18How did Lord Carnarvon, the first 'curse' victim, actually die in 1923?
An infected mosquito bite
An infected mosquito bite. He died only weeks after the burial chamber was opened, and newspapers hungry for a story turned his death into the pharaoh's curse.
Q 19When Ramesses II's mummy flew to Paris in 1976, what was it greeted with at Le Bourget?
Full military honours
Full military honours. The Republican Guard received the pharaoh like a visiting head of state; the often-repeated tale that Egypt had to issue him a passport is false.
Q 20What was done to Ramesses II's mummy in France before it went home to Egypt in 1977?
Irradiated against fungi
Irradiated against fungi. Parasites were eating the pharaoh, so engineers at a French atomic research centre bathed the whole mummy in gamma rays before sending him home.
Q 24Tollund Man, the famous bog body found in 1950, was preserved in which country?
Denmark
Denmark. The peat cutters who dug him up near Silkeborg saw a face so fresh, stubble and all, that they reported a murder to the police.
Q 25What did a 1950 autopsy conclude about how Tollund Man died?
He was hanged
He was hanged. The plaited leather noose was still around his neck; some scholars read his death as a ritual offering, perhaps for fertility, and others as an execution.
Q 26Most bog bodies, including Tollund Man and Lindow Man, date to which period?
The Iron Age
The Iron Age. Bog acid tans skin like leather while leaching the calcium from bones, which is why a 2,000-year-old face can survive with every wrinkle intact.
Q 27Lindow Man, England's 'Pete Marsh' bog body, is displayed in which London museum?
British Museum
British Museum. Peat cutters found him in a Cheshire bog in 1984; a blow to the head, a cord at his neck and a cut throat have been read as a ritual 'triple death', though some experts doubt the last two.
Q 28Xin Zhui, China's remarkably preserved 'Lady Dai', lived more than 2,100 years ago under which dynasty?
Han
Han. Her tomb came to light when hospital workers dug an air-raid shelter into a hill, and about 1,500 high-school students then helped to excavate it.
Q 29The Tarim mummies were discovered in the Tarim Basin of which region?
Xinjiang, China
Xinjiang, China. Their Western looks long suggested migrants from far away, but DNA research in 2021 found the earliest of them were a genetically isolated local people.
Q 30Hair from the 'Llullaillaco Maiden', an Inca girl found frozen on a volcano, showed heavy use of alcohol and which leaf?
Coca
Coca. Her braids kept a record of her final years: the doses jumped about a year before she died, when researchers think she was chosen, and kept climbing.