World History
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7correct to beat the crowd
This history trivia quiz has 150 free questions with answers and spans the full arc of human civilisation: the first writing systems in Mesopotamia, the empires of Egypt, Greece, Rome and China, the medieval kingdoms, the age of exploration, the revolutions in America and France, two world wars and the Cold War that ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The 150 questions are mixed from easy to hard, so it works as a warm-up for a family quiz night, a classroom starter, or a set of historical trivia questions and answers for a solo test of how much actually stuck. Multiple choice, instant scoring, and a short explanation after every answer. Every answer has been checked against a real source and each question shows where it came from, so if a result looks wrong you can see the evidence rather than take our word for it.
30 of 150 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Machu Picchu, likely built for the emperor Pachacuti, was the work of which civilization?
Inca
Inca: Hiram Bingham mistook Machu Picchu for the last Inca capital, which was really Vilcabamba.
Q 02The Rosetta Stone repeats one decree in hieroglyphs, Demotic and which third script?
Greek
Greek: comparing the Greek text with the two Egyptian versions helped Champollion crack hieroglyphs in the 1820s.
Q 03What kept water flowing along Rome's aqueducts?
A gentle downhill slope
A gentle downhill slope: the water moved by gravity alone, and where a valley was too deep for arches, engineers used inverted siphons to carry it down and back up.
Q 04Which Greek city-state is often called the birthplace of democracy?
Athens
Athens: citizens could exile a politician for ten years by scratching his name on pottery shards, a vote called ostracism.
Q 05The Great Wall of China was primarily built to defend against invasions from which direction?
North
North: the walls guarded against steppe nomads such as the Xiongnu, yet in 1644 a Chinese general opened the gates at Shanhai Pass to the invaders.
Q 06The Epic of Gilgamesh survives on clay tablets written in which script?
Cuneiform
Cuneiform: once it fell out of use in ancient times, no one could read it until 19th-century scholars cracked the Behistun Inscription.
Q 07Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC on a date the Roman calendar knew by what name?
The Ides of March
The Ides of March: Caesar was stabbed 23 times and fell beside a statue of Pompey, the rival he had beaten in civil war.
Q 08Cyrus the Great, who took Babylon in 539 BC, founded which Persian dynasty's realm?
Achaemenid
Achaemenid: Cyrus's clay cylinder boasts that he restored temples and let exiles go home, propaganda to justify his rule to the Babylonians.
Q 09What volcanic eruption in 79 AD buried the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum?
Mount Vesuvius
Mount Vesuvius erupted on 24 August 79 AD (by the traditional date); ash and pyroclastic flows sealed Pompeii and Herculaneum so completely that their 18th-century rediscovery gave an unmatched snapshot of Roman daily life.
Q 10Which general led war elephants across the Alps to invade Roman Italy?
Hannibal
Hannibal: most of his elephants were dead within months of the crossing, yet in 216 BC he still destroyed a Roman army at Cannae.
Q 11What name did Ferdinand von Richthofen popularise in 1877 for the network of Asian trade routes?
Silk Road
Silk Road: in the 6th century, agents of the Byzantine emperor smuggled silkworm eggs back along these routes so Byzantium could make its own silk.
Q 12Which pandemic reached Europe in 1347 and killed at least 30 percent of Europeans?
The Black Death
The Black Death: so many workers died that the survivors could demand much higher wages for their labour.
Q 13Magna Carta, sealed at Runnymede in 1215, primarily limited the power of which English monarch?
John
John: he then persuaded Pope Innocent III to annul the charter, and the rebel barons went back to war against him.
Q 21Which Italian artist painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling for Pope Julius II between 1508 and 1512?
Michelangelo
Michelangelo: far from keen on the commission, he still finished the ceiling in four years, working largely alone high on a scaffold.
Q 22Which explorer, sailing for Spain, kept insisting that the lands he had reached were part of Asia?
Christopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus: believing he was in the Indies, he called the people he met 'indios', which is how the word Indian came to be used for them.
Q 23The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas divided newly discovered lands between which two powers?
Spain and Portugal
Q 14Which city was the capital of the Byzantine Empire for over a thousand years?
Constantinople
Constantinople: the giant cannon that battered its walls in 1453 had first been offered to the Byzantines, who could not afford the gunmaker's price.
Q 15Which weapon did the archers of Henry V's army carry at Agincourt in 1415?
Longbow
Longbow: rain had turned the freshly ploughed field to mud, so armoured French knights floundered under the arrows and the outnumbered English won.
Q 16Which Mongol leader founded the empire that became history's largest contiguous land empire?
Genghis Khan
Genghis Khan: after his father was poisoned, his tribe abandoned the family to poverty, yet by 1206 the Mongol tribes had proclaimed him their ruler.
Q 17A century after its founder died in 632, which religion's rulers held Spain to Central Asia?
Islam
Islam: when the Abbasids overthrew the Umayyad caliphs in 750, a surviving prince escaped to Spain and founded his own emirate at Córdoba.
Q 18Taken by the First Crusade in 1099 and retaken by Saladin in 1187, which city were the Crusades chiefly fought to control?
Jerusalem
Jerusalem: after Saladin retook it, Emperor Frederick II won it back by treaty in 1229, in a Sixth Crusade fought with diplomacy rather than battles.
Q 19Which West African state did Mansa Musa rule when he made his lavish 1324 pilgrimage to Mecca?
Mali
Mali: Mansa Musa is said to have handed out so much gold in Cairo that its value there fell for years.
Q 20What 1517 document by Martin Luther is considered to have launched the Protestant Reformation?
The 95 Theses
The 95 Theses: Luther sent them to bishops to protest the sale of indulgences, and whether he also nailed them to a church door is still debated.
Spain and Portugal: the line ran 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands, which is why Brazil, jutting east across it, became Portuguese.
Q 24Johannes Gutenberg printed his famous Bible in which language?
Latin
Latin: soon after it was printed, Gutenberg's backer Johann Fust sued him over the loans and won control of the workshop.
Q 25Which Ottoman sultan, aged just 21, ended the Byzantine Empire in 1453 by capturing its capital?
Mehmed II
Mehmed II: to get past the chain across the Golden Horn, he had warships hauled overland and launched into the harbour behind it.
Q 26What name was given to the ocean crossing that carried enslaved Africans to plantations across the Atlantic?
The Middle Passage
The Middle Passage: it was the middle leg of a three-part voyage, as ships carried goods to Africa, captives to the Americas and plantation goods back to Europe.
Q 27Which philosopher wrote 'The Prince,' a political treatise on gaining and maintaining power, in 1513?
Niccolo Machiavelli
Niccolo Machiavelli: he wrote it on his farm after the Medici had him jailed and tortured, hoping it would win him their favour.
Q 28Which general, the first president of Gran Colombia, led much of South America to independence from Spain?
Simón Bolívar
Simón Bolívar: Bolivia was named in his honour, yet he died in 1830 as the Gran Colombia he had built was breaking apart.
Q 29Leonardo da Vinci's 'Mona Lisa' is housed in which famous museum?
The Louvre
The Louvre: Vincenzo Peruggia, a glazier who had worked at the museum, stole the painting in 1911, and the theft made it world-famous.
Q 30The Peace of Westphalia, two treaties signed in Osnabrück and Münster in 1648, ended which conflict?
Thirty Years' War
Thirty Years' War: Westphalia was long credited with founding the modern system of sovereign states, though some historians now call that a myth.