Persian Gulf Trivia
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47 free Persian Gulf trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Persian Gulf trivia covers a shallow, salty, 989-kilometre sea that is dry land for most of the last ice age, the cradle of the world's oldest civilisation, the source of a fifth of the planet's LNG and a quarter of its seaborne oil, and the subject of a naming argument that has run since the 1960s. Everything in and out passes through the Strait of Hormuz, only 56 kilometres wide at its narrowest. This quiz covers the geography (the eight coastal states, Qeshm, Bahrain, Bubiyan and the artificial islands of Dubai and Doha, the 90-metre maximum depth, the Shatt al-Arab), the oceanography (why salty water leaves along the bottom), the names (the Assyrians' 'Bitter Sea', Nearchus, the Sasanian Pudig, 'Gulf of Iran' at the IHO), the history (Dilmun, the H3 boats in Kuwait, Darius's canal, Siraf, Albuquerque and Hormuz, Shah Abbas expelling the Portuguese from Bahrain in 1602, the Al Qasimi pirates and the 1820 treaty, the Trucial States, the Persian Corridor, the Tanker War, Iran Air 655 and HMS Jufair), the wildlife (dugongs, humpback dolphins, kalbaensis kingfishers, 700 fish species) and the economy (Safaniya, the North Field and South Pars, urea and ammonia). Easy questions suit anyone who can find it on a map; the expert tier assumes you know the annual evaporation deficit. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The 1991 Gulf War followed Iraq's invasion of which neighbouring Gulf state?
Kuwait
Kuwait was overrun on 2 August 1990 and freed in February 1991; the retreating Iraqi army set more than 600 of its oil wells alight, and the last was not capped until that November.
Q 02Which body of water lies immediately east of the Strait of Hormuz, on the way to the open ocean?
The Gulf of Oman
The Gulf of Oman takes every ship that leaves, and then the Arabian Sea; inside the strait itself the shipping lane in each direction is only about two miles wide, with a two-mile buffer between them.
Q 03Which oil giant began life in 1909 as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, after a big strike at Masjed Soleyman in Iran?
BP
BP became a state concern in 1914: the British government bought a 51% stake so that the Royal Navy, which Churchill was switching from coal to oil, had a supply of its own.
Q 04The Persian Gulf is ultimately an arm of which of the world's great bodies of water?
The Indian Ocean
The Indian Ocean reaches it through the Arabian Sea and the Strait of Hormuz; so much water evaporates in the heat, and so little river water arrives, that the Gulf is markedly saltier than the ocean that fills it.
Q 05Which nation's only coast is a 58 km strip at the Gulf's head?
Iraq
Iraq has about 58 km of coast in all, while Kuwait next door, a country some 25 times smaller, has nearly 500 km.
Q 06The Musandam Peninsula, cut off from its country by the UAE, gives which nation its only Gulf shoreline?
Oman
Oman's northern tip can be reached overland only through the Emirates, yet it juts into the Strait of Hormuz and gives the country a share in controlling it, along with Iran.
Q 07What are the Gulf's traditional wooden trading boats, rigged with slanting triangular sails, called?
Dhows
Dhows were traditionally sewn rather than nailed: the hull planks were stitched together with coconut-fibre rope, and boats built that way carried Gulf trade to India and East Africa.
Q 08Which island's terminal was handling about 90% of Iran's crude oil exports when war broke out in 2026?
Kharg Island
Kharg Island, a coral outcrop some 25 km off the Bushehr coast, is guarded so closely by the Revolutionary Guards that Iranians know it as the Forbidden Island.
Q 09Roughly how deep does the famously shallow Persian Gulf get at its deepest?
90 metres
90 metres is about as deep as it gets, bar a few spots near the entrance: stand the 330-metre Eiffel Tower on the bottom and more than two-thirds of it would clear the surface.
Q 10Which river delta forms the Persian Gulf's north-western shoreline?
The Shatt al-Arab
The Shatt al-Arab is the Tigris and Euphrates joined into one; a tributary, the Karun, dumps so much silt into it that the channel has to be dredged constantly to stay open to ships.
Q 11Which Arctic explorer, remembered in a Canadian bay, was killed at a siege on Qeshm, the Gulf's largest island?
William Baffin
William Baffin went ashore in January 1622 to measure a fort's walls so the gunners could find their range, and was shot dead as he worked.
Q 12A sea causeway about 25 km long joins Bahrain to which country?
Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia is reached by the King Fahd Causeway; in March 2011 about a thousand Saudi troops rolled across it in armoured carriers to help Bahrain's rulers put down an uprising.
Q 13The World Islands, an artificial archipelago built for tourism, lie off which Gulf city?
Dubai
Dubai's developer Nakheel piled up some 300 sand islands in the shape of a world map from 2003, but the 2008 financial crash stopped the work, and years later almost all of them still lay empty.
Q 21What were the tar-coated hulls of 7,000-year-old seagoing boats found in Kuwait, among the oldest known, made of?
Bundled reeds
Bundled reeds left their imprint on one face of the tar slabs and barnacles grew on the other, which is how archaeologists know that boats built on this shore around 5000 BC really went to sea.
Q 22Dilmun, centred on Bahrain, was the middleman between Sumer and which civilisation?
The Indus Valley
The Indus Valley lay at the far end of Dilmun's sea lane, and copper was the prize cargo passed on to Sumer; the many thousands of burial mounds that still crowd Bahrain date from those boom centuries.
Q 23Which Persian king, who also attacked Greece, boasted of a canal from the Nile to 'the sea that begins in Persia'?
Q 14How does the Gulf's extra-salty water leave through the Strait of Hormuz?
Along the seabed
Along the seabed: evaporation leaves Gulf water so salty and dense that it sinks and slides out beneath the fresher ocean water flowing in on top.
Q 15Nearchus, who sailed a fleet the length of the Gulf around 325 BC, was which conqueror's admiral?
Alexander the Great
Alexander the Great marched his army home through the Gedrosian desert and gave Nearchus the fleet; the admiral's own account of the voyage is lost, and survives only through later writers such as Arrian.
Q 16In 2012 Iran threatened to sue which company for leaving the Gulf without any name on its online maps?
Google replied that it simply did not label every place in the world, but its spokesman named no other place the maps had left blank.
Q 17The shamal, a north-westerly wind that blows down the Gulf each summer, is notorious for bringing what?
Dust storms
Dust storms are the shamal's trademark: the hot, dry wind blows almost without a break through June and early July, and its haze can grow thick enough to hide the coast from ships.
Q 18Which rival name for the Persian Gulf only caught on in the 1960s?
The Arabian Gulf
The Arabian Gulf label spread with Arab nationalism from the early 1960s, and the quarrel has teeth: the 2010 Islamic Solidarity Games in Iran were cancelled in a row over which name would go on the medals.
Q 19What was the Persian Gulf at the height of the last ice age?
A dry river valley
A dry river valley: with sea level some 125 metres lower, the Tigris and Euphrates ran across a plain that may have sheltered people from the deserts around it, until the sea flooded back within the last 12,000 years.
Q 20Which civilisation, the world's oldest known, developed along the Persian Gulf and southern Mesopotamia?
Sumer
Sumer raised Ur, Uruk and the other first cities on the plain at the head of the Gulf; the water that once served Ur has since moved away, and its ruins now stand high and dry.
Darius the Great
Darius the Great's boast survives on a pink granite slab dug up in 1866 by Charles de Lesseps, whose father Ferdinand was then building the Suez Canal, the modern heir to the king's waterway.
Q 24Which traveller reached Hormuz in the 1270s and judged its stitched ships 'wretched affairs'?
Marco Polo
Marco Polo wrote that the ships had no iron nails, were rubbed with fish oil instead of pitch, and were often lost; he took the long road through Persia, and only came home by way of Hormuz and the sea two decades later.
Q 25Which treasure of Bahrain's waters, prized since antiquity, had made the island rich when Portugal seized it in 1521?
Pearls
Pearls were still the Gulf's great trade four centuries later; then Japanese cultured pearls reached world markets in the 1930s and the old fishery collapsed, just as oil was struck in Bahrain in 1932.
Q 26Which English company's warships helped Persia take Hormuz from Portugal in 1622?
The East India Company
The East India Company struck while England and Portugal were at peace; to smooth over the scandal it paid the Duke of Buckingham 10,000 pounds, and King James I, who complained of getting nothing, appears to have received the same.
Q 27Which mainland port took over from Hormuz as Persia's main trade outlet after the island fell in 1622?
Bandar Abbas
Bandar Abbas means Port of Abbas, after the shah who developed it; English traders knew it as Gombroon, and their price for helping at Hormuz was a share of the customs, which they went on claiming at the new port.
Q 28What did Britons of the early 1800s call the shore of today's United Arab Emirates?
The Pirate Coast
The Pirate Coast was named for the Qawasim of Ras al-Khaimah, whose stronghold the British stormed in 1819; a later ruler of Sharjah, himself a Qasimi, wrote a history arguing the piracy was a myth.
Q 29By what name were the United Arab Emirates known under British protection before 1971?
The Trucial States
The Trucial States were named for the sea truces their sheikhs signed with Britain from 1820; when Britain left in 1971 six of them formed the United Arab Emirates, and Ras al-Khaimah joined early the next year.
Q 30Which empire sent troops into Qatar in 1871, let in by the sheikh's son Jassim?
The Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman Empire wore out its welcome: in 1893 the same Jassim's men routed a force sent to arrest him, and in 1916 Qatar signed up for British protection instead.