Syria Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
60 free Syria trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Syria holds some of the oldest cities on Earth and the world's earliest alphabet, and this quiz runs the whole length of its story: Ebla and Ugarit, the Battle of Kadesh, Zenobia's rebellion at Palmyra, Paul on the road to Damascus, the Umayyad caliphs, Saladin and the Crusader castles, Tamerlane, four centuries of Ottoman rule, Sykes-Picot and the French Mandate, independence in 1946, the union with Egypt, the Ba'ath coup and 53 years of Assad rule that ended in December 2024. Easy questions ask for the capital, the neighbours, the sea and the religion of the majority; the harder ones want the meaning of the flag's three red stars, the mountain that is the highest point, the village that still speaks Aramaic, the drug that became the country's biggest export, the year of the Hama massacre and Syria's only Olympic gold medallist. There is also the Umayyad Mosque, the Aleppo souk, Aleppo soap, kibbeh and arak, Damascus steel, the Golan Heights and the Kurds of the north-east. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the country, its cities and its history, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the official language of Syria?
Arabic
Arabic is Syria's official language; most Syrians speak Levantine Arabic, while Mesopotamian Arabic dialects are heard in the north-east.
Q 02Syria's coastline lies on which sea?
The Mediterranean
The Mediterranean washes Syria's coastline; Latakia and Tartus are its main ports, and Arwad, off Tartus, is the country's only inhabited island.
Q 03Which country borders Syria to the north?
Turkey
Turkey has invaded northern Syria repeatedly since 2016 to fight Kurdish forces, and hosts millions of Syrian refugees.
Q 04The Assad family's rule over Syria ended with the fall of the capital on which date?
8 December 2024
Damascus fell on 8 December 2024, eleven days after Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham launched its offensive in the north-west; Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow, ending more than five decades of family rule.
Q 05Who became Syria's transitional president in January 2025?
Ahmed al-Sharaa
Ahmed al-Sharaa, formerly known by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, led Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham and was named transitional president on 29 January 2025, signing a five-year constitutional declaration that March.
Q 06Hafez al-Assad took power in the bloodless coup of November 1970 known as what?
The Corrective Movement
The Corrective Movement was the name Hafez al-Assad gave his November 1970 coup, which ousted Salah Jadid; he ruled until his death in 2000, when his son Bashar succeeded him.
Q 07In which year did the Ba'ath Party seize power in Syria, beginning six decades of one-party rule?
1963
The Ba'ath seized power on 8 March 1963; the state of emergency declared that day formally lasted until 2011, and party founders Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar were sidelined within a few years.
Q 08From 1958 to 1961 Syria merged with which country to form the United Arab Republic?
Egypt
Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser dominated the union; Syrian officers including a young Hafez al-Assad secretly organised against it, and a coup in Damascus ended it in September 1961.
Q 09Which European power held the League of Nations mandate over Syria between the world wars?
France
France received the League of Nations mandate for Syria at the 1920 San Remo conference, after French troops crushed Faisal's short-lived Arab kingdom at the Battle of Maysalun that July.
Q 10The 1916 secret deal carving the Ottoman Middle East into British and French zones is named after which two diplomats?
Sykes and Picot
Sykes and Picot, Britain's Mark Sykes and the French diplomat Francois Georges-Picot, drew their line, in Sykes's words, from 'the e in Acre to the last k in Kirkuk'; Mosul later moved to the British zone for its oil.
Q 11In which script did the scribes of Ugarit write their 14th-century BC tablets?
Cuneiform
Cuneiform signs, pressed into clay with a stylus, were adapted at Ugarit into a 30-letter alphabet; the city near modern Latakia was destroyed around 1190 BC in the Bronze Age collapse.
Q 12The Bronze Age kingdom of Ebla, famed for its tablet archive, lay near which modern city?
Idlib
Idlib governorate contains Tell Mardikh, the site of Ebla; its archive of thousands of clay tablets includes a treaty with the city of Abarsal from about 2300 BC.
Q 13Which queen of Palmyra rebelled against Rome in the 3rd century and briefly ruled into Egypt and Asia Minor?
Zenobia
Q 21In which year did the Ottoman Empire conquer Syria from the Mamluks, beginning four centuries of rule?
1516
Selim I's victory over the Mamluks at Marj Dabiq, north of Aleppo, in August 1516 brought Syria under Ottoman rule, and Damascus became the main staging post for the hajj caravan to Mecca.
Q 22What did the three red stars on Syria's flag originally represent?
The states of Aleppo, Damascus and Deir ez-Zor
The states of Aleppo, Damascus and Deir ez-Zor were the units of mandate-era Syria marked by the stars on the 1932 independence flag, whose green, white and black stripes recall early caliphates; the opposition revived it during the civil war.
Q 23What is Syria's highest point?
Zenobia declared her son Vaballathus emperor and her armies reached Alexandria and Ancyra before Rome crushed the revolt in 272; she was afterwards paraded in golden chains in a Roman triumph.
Q 14Julia Domna, empress of Rome as wife of Septimius Severus, came from which Syrian city?
Emesa (Homs)
Emesa (Homs) was home to her family, hereditary priests of the sun god Elagabal; her great-nephews Elagabalus and Severus Alexander, grandsons of her sister Julia Maesa, both became emperor.
Q 15According to the New Testament, which apostle was converted on the road to Damascus?
Paul
Paul, then Saul of Tarsus, was blinded by a light on the way to arrest Damascus Christians (Acts 9) and regained his sight after Ananias laid hands on him in the city.
Q 16The Great Mosque of Damascus is traditionally held to contain the head of which biblical figure?
John the Baptist
A shrine inside the prayer hall is said to hold the head of John the Baptist; the mosque, built in 706-715, replaced a Byzantine cathedral dedicated to him.
Q 17Which caliphate made Damascus its capital in the mid-7th century?
The Umayyad
The Umayyad caliphs ruled from Damascus after Muawiya took power in 661, governing from Spain to the Indus; the Abbasids overthrew them in 750 and the capital later moved to Baghdad.
Q 18Krak des Chevaliers, one of the best-preserved medieval castles, was held from 1142 to 1271 by which order?
The Knights Hospitaller
The Knights Hospitaller rebuilt the castle after receiving it in 1142; the Mamluk sultan Baibars took it in 1271, reportedly using a forged letter from their Grand Master ordering surrender.
Q 19Which Kurdish-born leader, founder of the Ayyubid dynasty, conquered most of Syria between 1175 and 1185?
Saladin
Saladin, born to a Kurdish family at Tikrit, took Damascus in 1174 and Aleppo in 1183; he died in Damascus in 1193 and his tomb lies in the old city.
Q 20Which conqueror sacked Aleppo in 1400 and deported the artisans of Damascus to Samarkand?
Tamerlane
Tamerlane (Timur) took Aleppo in October 1400 and Damascus early in 1401, shipping its craftsmen to his capital Samarkand; Hulegu's Mongols had sacked both cities in 1260 before losing at Ain Jalut.
Mount Hermon
Mount Hermon, known locally as Jabal al-Shaykh, rises to 2,814 metres at the southern end of Syria's western mountain border; its snowmelt feeds the springs of the River Jordan.
Q 24Which basalt plateau in south-west Syria has Israel occupied since the Six-Day War?
The Golan Heights
The Golan Heights, about two-thirds of which Israel captured in under 48 hours of fighting, were placed under Israeli law in 1981, and the United States recognised the annexation in 2019.
Q 25Which river, Syria's most important, crosses the east of the country on its way to Iraq?
The Euphrates
The Euphrates crosses Syria for some 600 km, flowing south-east past Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor; the Tabqa Dam on it created Lake Assad, the country's largest reservoir.
Q 26How many governorates is Syria divided into?
14
Syria's 14 governorates, or muhafazat, range from the capital, which is a governorate in its own right, to Rif Dimashq, which surrounds it, and Homs, the largest by area.
Q 27Which ancient language survives in the village of Maaloula, north-east of Damascus?
Aramaic
Aramaic, the lingua franca of the Near East for roughly a thousand years until the Islamic conquests, survives in Maaloula as Western Neo-Aramaic, also spoken in the nearby villages of Bakh'a and Jubb'adin.
Q 28The Assad family belongs to which religious minority that came to dominate the army?
Alawite
Alawites are about a tenth of the population, concentrated on the coast. Sunnis make up roughly three-quarters.
Q 29Who make up Syria's second-largest ethnic group, about a tenth of the population, mostly in the north-east?
Kurds
Their Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces did much of the ground fighting against Islamic State with US air support.
Q 30Which community in Syria mostly descends from survivors of the 1915 Ottoman genocide?
Armenians
Armenians reached Syria on Ottoman deportation marches that ended at Deir ez-Zor in the desert; their descendants formed large communities in Aleppo and Kesab, much reduced by emigration after 2011.