Q 01/05

A crater named after Ibn Battuta lies on which body of the Solar System?

A) Mars

B) Mercury

C) The Moon

D) Venus

Answer · why

C) The Moon

The Moon. The 11 km crater in the Sea of Fertility was plain Goclenius A until 1976, when astronomers renamed it after the traveller.

Q 02/05

Ibn Battuta is often called the Muslim world's answer to which earlier traveller?

A) Leif Erikson

B) Marco Polo

C) Benjamin of Tudela

D) William of Rubruck

Answer · why

B) Marco Polo

Marco Polo. The Venetian died the year before Ibn Battuta set out, and the Moroccan went on to cover far more ground, some 120,000 km, yet his account...

Q 03/05

Camels carried Ibn Battuta across deserts later on, but he left home in 1325 riding which animal?

A) A horse

B) A mule

C) A pony

D) A donkey

Answer · why

D) A donkey

A donkey. On the road across North Africa he fell so ill with fever that he was tied into the saddle to keep from falling off, and kept going.

Q 04/05

The name "Ibn Battuta" is a patronymic that literally means what?

A) Son of the desert

B) Son of a duckling

C) Son of a judge

D) Son of the traveller

Answer · why

B) Son of a duckling

His full name as given in the Rihla runs to eleven links of ancestry ending in Lawati al-Tanji.

Q 05/05

In the Anatolian city of Konya, Ibn Battuta visited the tomb of which Persian poet?

A) Saadi

B) Omar Khayyam

C) Ferdowsi

D) Rumi

Answer · why

D) Rumi

Rumi. The tale he heard there says the poet was a professor who walked out of his own lecture to follow a sweet-seller, vanished for years and came ba...