Ancient Nubia
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50 free Ancient Nubia trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Nubia, the stretch of the Nile valley south of Egypt, was home to some of Africa's earliest kingdoms. Its rulers traded with the pharaohs, fought them, were conquered by them, and in the eighth century BC turned the tables and ruled Egypt themselves. The story is far less familiar than the one told downstream, which is what makes it such good quiz material. This quiz follows the cultures of Nubia in order: the early peoples known only from their graves, the mud-brick city of Kerma, the kingdom of Kush with its pyramid fields and its own script, the queens who faced down Rome, and the Christian kingdoms of the Middle Ages. A last group of questions covers the 1960s rescue of Nubian temples from the rising waters of a new reservoir. It suits world history students revising the kingdoms of the Nile, teachers who want a ready-made review, and anyone who has stood in front of a Nubian temple in a museum and wondered where it came from. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which modern country, heartland of ancient Nubia, has more pyramids than Egypt?
Sudan
Sudan has more than 200 known pyramids, raised by Kushite rulers over the tombs of kings, queens and wealthy citizens.
Q 02Ancient Egyptians called Nubia Ta-Seti, a name usually translated as the 'Land of' which weapon?
The Bow
The Bow was so much Nubia's weapon that Egyptian armies recruited Nubian archers, and a tomb model from Asyut shows a company of them on the march.
Q 03Which title did the ruling queens of Kush hold, one of whom appears in the Book of Acts?
Kandake
Kandake reached English as the name Candace, because the Book of Acts uses the Kushite title as if it were the queen's own name.
Q 04Which queen of Kush, described by Strabo as blind in one eye, raided Roman Egypt and won a peace?
Amanirenas
Amanirenas sent envoys who met the emperor on Samos, and the treaty they won kept the frontier peaceful for about three centuries.
Q 05Kushite raiders buried a looted bronze head of which Roman emperor beneath temple steps at Meroë?
Augustus
Augustus lay underfoot for more than 1,900 years: the head was buried below a temple stair, and the dry sand preserved its glass and calcite eyes.
Q 06Apedemak, the Kushite war god with a temple at Naqa, is shown with the head of which animal?
Lion
Lion heads mark Apedemak, a god with no Egyptian counterpart; one carving even gives him three of them, along with four arms.
Q 07Which rock-cut temples of Ramesses II in Nubia were cut into blocks and moved uphill in the 1960s?
Abu Simbel
Abu Simbel was taken apart in blocks of up to 30 tons and rebuilt on higher ground by 1968, inside an artificial hill raised over a dome.
Q 08The Nubian Temple of Dendur, Egypt's thank-you gift for rescue help, stands in which American city?
New York
New York has shown the temple at the Metropolitan Museum of Art since 1978; it was one of four Nubian temples Egypt gave to countries that helped.
Q 09Which animals did the Kushite king Piye, conqueror of Egypt, have buried near his tomb at El-Kurru?
Horses
Horses were buried standing upright with all their trappings at El-Kurru, a custom that three later Kushite kings followed.
Q 10What name is given to the huge mud-brick temple at the heart of Kerma, first capital of Kush?
Deffufa
Deffufa is the name given to the great mud-brick monuments at Kerma; the western one, a temple, still towers over the ruins of the city that grew up around it.
Q 11What name is given to the six rocky rapids that made Nubia's Nile so hard to sail?
Cataracts
Cataracts are shallow reaches where boulders and rocky islets break the surface; the six are numbered going upstream, away from the Mediterranean.
Q 12Which Nubian desert people scouted for Egypt, their name later becoming an Egyptian word for police?
Medjay
The Medjay began as nomads of Nubia's eastern desert, but by the New Kingdom the name had lost its ethnic meaning and was simply a job title.
Q 13Nubia traditionally begins just south of which Egyptian city, later the site of a giant Nile dam?
Aswan
Aswan sits just below the first of the Nile's great rapids, the natural barrier that marked where Egypt ended and Nubia began.
Q 21Which Egyptian god, worshipped in ram-headed form, had his chief Kushite temple at Jebel Barkal?
Amun
Amun had a temple there begun by Egypt's New Kingdom pharaohs and greatly enlarged by Piye, the Kushite king who went on to conquer Egypt.
Q 22Which Kushite pharaoh, named in the Bible's account of a siege, built the largest pyramid at Nuri?
Taharqa
Taharqa is the Bible's Tirhakah, and his reign was a boom time: an unusually high Nile flood brought abundant crops to Egypt and Kush.
Q 23Which empire's armies, under Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal, drove the Kushite pharaohs out of Egypt?
The Assyrians
The Assyrians captured Memphis in 671 BC, and within a decade the Kushite kings had withdrawn up the Nile, never to rule Egypt again.
Q 14Lower Nubia is named for its place along the Nile's course, so it lies in which part of Nubia?
The north
The north is 'lower' because the Nile flows that way, down toward the Mediterranean, so Lower Nubia is the stretch closest to Egypt.
Q 15Which simple labels do archaeologists use for Nubia's earliest cultures, whose own names are unknown?
Letters of the alphabet
Letters of the alphabet gave history the A-Group and the C-Group; a B-Group was named too, then dropped as a mistake for poorer A-Group graves.
Q 16Which New Kingdom pharaoh destroyed Kerma and brought Kush under Egyptian rule for centuries?
Thutmose I
Thutmose I ended Kerma's long run as Egypt's rival, and the pharaohs then governed Nubia through a viceroy later titled the King's Son of Kush.
Q 17Kerma allied against Egypt with which foreign dynasty that ruled the Nile Delta from Avaris?
Hyksos
The Hyksos in the Delta and Kerma far upriver left the Egyptian kings at Thebes facing two threats at once, until they defeated both.
Q 18Which American archaeologist dug Kerma and wrongly took it for an Egyptian governor's fort?
George Reisner
George Reisner took the Egyptian statues in Kerma's great tombs for proof of Egyptian rulers, and it was decades before scholars accepted the city as Nubian.
Q 19Skulls of which animals, thousands of them, were buried around the royal tombs of Kerma?
Cattle
Cattle were royal wealth at Kerma, and study of the skulls suggests herds were driven in from far-off districts when a ruler died.
Q 20Which city below the holy mountain Jebel Barkal was Kush's capital when its kings conquered Egypt?
Napata
Napata was sacked by an Egyptian army in 593 BC, and the Kushite kings later made Meroë, far upriver, their seat, though Napata stayed their holy city.
Q 24Statues of Kushite pharaohs show two of which creature rearing side by side on the brow?
Cobras
Cobras in a pair, known as the double uraeus, are thought to have signalled rule over two lands at once, Nubia and Egypt.
Q 25The Shabaka Stone, a Kushite pharaoh's copy of an old creation text, was probably reused as what?
A millstone
A millstone would explain the hole and radiating grooves that wiped out much of a text the pharaoh said he had rescued from a worm-eaten papyrus.
Q 26A largely fictional ancient romance pits which conqueror against a queen of Meroë, though he never marched on Nubia?
Alexander the Great
Alexander the Great went no further south than the oasis of Siwa in Egypt; the tale of his Nubian encounter comes from a romance written centuries after his death.
Q 27Meroë's furnaces reportedly led one scholar to call it the 'Birmingham of Africa' for which metal?
Iron
Iron ore and hardwood for the furnaces lay close at hand, one reason given for moving the Kushite capital there, though the industry's true scale is debated.
Q 28Which Red Sea trading kingdom left inscriptions at Meroë that point to a fourth-century AD campaign?
Aksum
Aksum is often credited with ending Kush, but historians still argue over whether its army delivered the blow or struck a kingdom already in decline.
Q 29Carvings of which animals abound at Musawwarat es-Sufra, once thought a training camp for them?
Elephants
Elephants appear so often in the sculpture that a training camp was one early guess, alongside a college and a hospital; the site's purpose is still debated.
Q 30Which Italian treasure hunter demolished pyramids at Meroë in the 1830s, some with explosives?
Giuseppe Ferlini
Giuseppe Ferlini struggled to sell his haul because buyers refused to believe such fine jewellery was made so far south; it ended up in Munich and Berlin.