Q 01/05

Which part of the world never had an Iron Age, because nobody there smelted iron before Europeans arrived?

A) Sub-Saharan Africa

B) The Americas

C) Central Asia

D) South-East Asia

Answer · why

B) The Americas

The Americas. Inuit hunters hammered knives and harpoon tips from a fallen meteorite for centuries, but nobody in the New World smelted iron from ore ...

Q 02/05

By convention, what marks the local start of the Iron Age?

A) Smelted metal replacing bronze in daily use

B) The arrival of wheeled vehicles

C) The first use of any metal object

D) The first surviving written records

Answer · why

A) Smelted metal replacing bronze in daily use

Meteoric iron had been hammered into beads and daggers for thousands of years before anyone could smelt ore.

Q 03/05

Which raiders, known from pharaohs' inscriptions, were long blamed for the upheavals around 1200 BC as the Iron Age began?

A) The Hyksos

B) The Assyrians

C) The Sea Peoples

D) The Babylonians

Answer · why

C) The Sea Peoples

The Sea Peoples. Ramesses III boasted of beating them back on land and sea, yet where they came from is still debated.

Q 04/05

Christian Jürgensen Thomsen devised the Stone, Bronze and Iron Age sequence while arranging a museum's antiquities in which capital?

A) Stockholm

B) Copenhagen

C) Helsinki

D) Amsterdam

Answer · why

B) Copenhagen

Copenhagen. Thomsen was a businessman and collector with no training as a historian, yet the three labels he gave its jumbled collection became the fr...

Q 05/05

Which early Greek poet described five ages of mankind, sinking from a Golden Age to his own harsh Age of Iron?

A) Sappho

B) Pindar

C) Sophocles

D) Hesiod

Answer · why

D) Hesiod

Hesiod. In Works and Days he wished he had died earlier or been born later than the fifth age, an era of endless toil whose name archaeologists later ...