Sumer Trivia
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58 free Sumer trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Sumer trivia quiz covers the earliest known civilization, the city-states of southern Mesopotamia that gave the world writing, the wheel, the first codified laws and the first named author. The easy questions handle the basics: which modern country it sits in, the two rivers, what cuneiform was written on, the hero of the oldest surviving epic and the temple towers we call ziggurats. From there it moves through the city-states themselves, Uruk, Ur, Eridu, Lagash, Kish and Nippur, and the rulers who fought over them, from Eannatum and his Stele of the Vultures to Sargon of Akkad and Ur-Nammu. The harder half is for history buffs and students of the ancient Near East: what the Sumerians called their own land, the sexagesimal number system, the salt that slowly killed their fields, the Lyres of Ur, Queen Puabi's death pit, Leonard Woolley's excavations, the Gutian dark age and the century in which spoken Sumerian finally faded. If you have played our ancient history or Egypt quizzes, this is the deep dive on the civilization that came first. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries for Sumer, its major cities, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Sargon of Akkad and Enheduanna before publishing.
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Q 01Sumer, the earliest known civilization, lay in the south of which modern country?
Iraq
Iraq: Sumer was so thoroughly forgotten that even its name was lost until scholars in the 1800s pieced it back together from excavated inscriptions.
Q 02Sumerian farmers lived along the valleys of which two rivers?
Tigris and Euphrates
Tigris and Euphrates: the Greeks named the land Mesopotamia, 'between rivers', and canals cut from the two streams turned a dry plain into farmland rich enough to feed the first cities.
Q 03What was the Sumerian writing system called?
Cuneiform
Cuneiform means 'wedge-shaped', from Latin cuneus, after the marks a cut reed stylus left; the script began as little pictures and was later borrowed for other, unrelated languages.
Q 04What material did Sumerian scribes write on?
Moist clay
Moist clay: a fire that would destroy paper only bakes a tablet harder, which is why burned cities left whole archives for archaeologists to read.
Q 05Which poem about a king's search for immortality is often called the oldest surviving great work of literature?
The Epic of Gilgamesh
The Epic of Gilgamesh was pieced together from tablets dug up at Nineveh in the mid-1800s; its hero never wins eternal life, because a serpent eats the plant of youth before he can use it.
Q 06What name is given to the large layered temple platforms that are the most famous Sumerian buildings?
Ziggurats
Ziggurats, unlike Egypt's pyramids, had no rooms inside: each was a solid stepped mass, thought to have carried a shrine on top reached by outside stairs or ramps.
Q 07The blue lapis lazuli in the jewellery of Sumer's royal tombs came from mines in which modern country?
Afghanistan
Afghanistan: the stone came overland from the mountains of Badakhshan because Sumer's river plain had almost no stone, metal or timber of its own, so its cities had to trade for them.
Q 08Which Sumerian city is traditionally regarded, on the basis of the Sumerian King List, as the earliest city in southern Mesopotamia?
Eridu
Eridu: the King List opens with kingship descending from heaven to it, and excavators found its temple rebuilt on one spot again and again, a tiny shrine growing into a great platform.
Q 09What was the Sumerian word for a king, literally meaning 'great man'?
Lugal
Lugal joins lu, 'man', and gal, 'big'; the title's spread in the Early Dynastic period is often read as power passing from temple-based priest-rulers to more secular kings.
Q 10What did the Sumerians call themselves in their own language?
The black-headed people
The black-headed people: 'Sumer' is not their own word at all but the name their northern neighbours used, which later scholars borrowed for the land and its people.
Q 11What do the oldest known Sumerian writings mostly record?
Accounts of goods
Accounts of goods came first: the earliest records are ledgers of commodities with numerals and names, and for centuries writing served bookkeepers, not poets.
Q 12Linguists generally classify Sumerian as what kind of language?
A language isolate
A language isolate: no attempt to tie Sumerian to another family has held. One 19th-century Paris scholar long insisted it was no language at all, only a secret code invented by the Babylonians.
Q 13The rules of the Royal Game of Ur, a Sumerian board game, were worked out in the 1980s from what?
A Babylonian tablet
Q 21In the Sumerian afterlife, the dead were confined to the gloomy world of which goddess?
Ereshkigal
Ereshkigal ruled a realm behind seven gates. When her sister Inanna came calling, she had her stripped of one garment at each gate until she stood naked and powerless before the throne.
Q 22We count in tens, but Sumerian scribes built arithmetic on which number, still hiding in every clock?
Sixty
Sixty: Babylonian astronomers inherited the habit from Sumerian scribes, and it still divides our hours and minutes, the angles of geometry and the coordinates on every map.
Q 23Which crime writer met her future husband on the dig at Ur and later set a murder mystery on a Mesopotamian excavation?
Agatha Christie
A Babylonian tablet of 177 BC set out the rules, and British Museum curator Irving Finkel matched them to boards dug up at Ur: two players race their pieces from one end to the other.
Q 14In the Sumerian King List, roughly how long did each of the eight kings before the flood reign?
About 30,000 years
About 30,000 years each: the list gives the eight a combined 241,200 years, opening with Alulim's 28,800. After the flood the reigns shrink to centuries and then to believable decades.
Q 15Which Sumerian holy city was never a political capital, yet control of it was thought to confer kingship over the land?
Nippur
Nippur: a king's armies might conquer the country, but his right to rule still had to be sanctioned at its great temple, which kept the city sacred whichever dynasty was on top.
Q 16Which storm god was the chief of the Sumerian pantheon?
Enlil
Enlil split heaven from earth to make room for seeds to grow, one myth says, and then invented the hoe. His word decreed the fates, and it was he who granted kings their right to rule.
Q 17Inanna, goddess of love and war worshipped at Uruk, was the deification of which heavenly body?
Venus
Venus shows itself at dawn and again at dusk, and early Uruk honoured a morning Inanna and an evening Inanna to match. Her emblem, a rayed star, later became the sign of the planet itself.
Q 18Which biblical patriarch does Genesis say came from 'Ur of the Chaldees', often identified with the Sumerian city of Ur?
Abraham
Abraham: Genesis has his family set out from Ur of the Chaldees, matched with the Sumerian ruins since the 1860s, though some scholars place his Ur far to the north, near Harran.
Q 19In Sumerian myth, why did the gods create human beings?
To take over their hard labour
To take over their hard labour: in the myth of Enki and Ninmah the junior gods, worn out from digging canals, complain until Enki fashions humans as their substitutes.
Q 20What small carved object did a Sumerian wear on a cord and use as a signature on documents?
A cylinder seal
A cylinder seal, engraved with figures or writing, left a raised picture strip wherever it was rolled. It hung at its owner's neck so it was always to hand.
Agatha Christie came to Ur as a tourist in 1930 and within months married Max Mallowan, the young archaeologist told to show her round. Murder in Mesopotamia later put Poirot on a dig much like it.
Q 24The oldest law code yet discovered, written in Sumerian, is some three centuries older than which king's famous code?
Hammurabi
Hammurabi's Babylonian code demanded an eye for an eye. The Sumerian laws, some three centuries older, mostly set fines in silver instead: half a mina for a lost eye, two shekels for a tooth.
Q 25The Sumerians were among the first societies known to brew which drink from cereals?
Beer
Beer was a thick daily staple in Sumer, sipped through straws to strain out the dregs. A hymn to Ninkasi, the goddess of brewing, doubles as the oldest surviving beer recipe.
Q 26By the Ur III period, Sumerian farmers had switched from wheat to which more salt-tolerant crop as their principal cereal?
Barley
Barley copes with salty soil far better than wheat, and centuries of irrigation under a fierce sun had salted Sumer's fields. It was the staple grain and doubled as a means of payment.
Q 27What device, also used in Egypt, did the Sumerians employ to lift water for irrigation?
Shaduf
Shadufs are long poles balanced like seesaws, with a bucket on one end and a counterweight on the other to swing the water up. Farmers in Egypt and India still use them.
Q 28The Lyres of Ur, thought to be the world's oldest surviving stringed instruments, were discovered by which archaeologist?
Leonard Woolley
Leonard Woolley found the lyres among the bodies of attendants in Ur's Royal Cemetery. Their wooden frames had rotted away, so the instruments on show are rebuilt around the original gold, silver and shell.
Q 29Which queen was buried in the Ur royal cemetery accompanied in death by her servants?
Puabi
Puabi's tomb was one of the few at Ur that robbers never reached. She lay beneath a headdress of gold leaves and ribbons, with gold cups beside her and her attendants around her.
Q 30Scans of remains from Ur's royal tombs suggest attendants, long thought poisoned, died of what?
Head wounds
Head wounds: two scanned skulls showed blows from a pointed weapon. Traces of mercury suggest the bodies were then preserved for the funeral rites.