Ancient Civilizations Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which ruined southern African city, occupied between about AD 1100 and 1450, is dominated by a great elliptical enclosure of mortar-free granite walls up to eleven metres high and a conical stone tower, and gave its modern nation its name?

Question 2

Which seafaring people of a string of city-states on the coast of modern Lebanon spread their trade and their letters right across the Mediterranean from about 1200 BC, founded colonies including Carthage, and extracted a fabulously expensive purple dye from rotting sea snails?

Question 3

Who founded the Achaemenid Persian Empire in the 6th century BC, took Babylon without a battle in 539 BC, and issued a clay cylinder, sometimes called an early charter of rights, that allowed deported peoples including the Jews to return home?

Question 4

Which trading power, centred in the highlands of what is now Ethiopia and Eritrea, raised the tallest carved single stones ever attempted, minted its own gold coins, controlled Red Sea commerce, and around AD 340 became one of the first states anywhere to adopt Christianity?

Question 5

Which Athenian philosopher wrote nothing himself, spent his days questioning fellow citizens in the marketplace until they contradicted themselves, and was condemned to die by drinking hemlock in 399 BC for impiety and 'corrupting the youth'?

Question 6

Which is the earliest major civilisation of Mexico, flourishing on the humid Gulf coast from about 1200 BC and best known for carving colossal helmeted human heads, some three metres tall, from single basalt boulders hauled dozens of kilometres from the mountains?

Question 7

Which people dominated central Italy before Rome's rise, built cities on hilltops in what is now Tuscany, buried their dead in painted chamber tombs under earth mounds, and gave the early Romans their alphabet, their arch, their gladiatorial games and the practice of reading omens in the livers of sacrificed animals?

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About Ancient Civilizations

Civilisation did not begin once, in one place. It began many times: on the mudflats of southern Iraq, along the Nile, in the Indus plain, on the Yellow River, in the highland basins of Mexico and Peru, on the Anatolian plateau, and at a scatter of other sites where people first built cities, kept records, obeyed kings and worshipped in monumental temples. This quiz is a tour of those beginnings, from the first stepped towers of Sumer to the last emperor of the West, and of the peoples who are too often left off the list.

The famous names are here: the pyramid-builders of Egypt, the law-givers and library-keepers of Mesopotamia, Persia under Cyrus and Darius, classical Athens and Sparta, the Roman Republic and Empire, the First Emperor of China. So are the ones that get less attention: the Indus cities with their drains and no palaces, the Nubian pharaohs of Kush, Aksum in the Ethiopian highlands, the Nok terracottas of Nigeria, Olmec stone heads, the Nazca lines, the oldest city in the Americas at Caral, and Gobekli Tepe, where hunter-gatherers raised carved pillars before farming had even begun.

Ancient history is built on fragments, and the quiz tries to be honest about that. Scripts like Linear A and the Indus seals are still unread. Dates before about 700 BC are often approximate and argued over. Much of what we 'know' about a people comes from their enemies, or from much later legend, and the answer explanations flag the cases where the evidence is thin, disputed or filtered through hostile sources.

It also keeps returning to a few connecting threads: how writing was invented more than once, for accountants before poets; how monumental building, law, coinage and organised religion appear again and again as cities grow; how empires rise on roads, granaries and standing armies and fall to drought, overreach, plague and migration; and how ideas, the alphabet, the arch, the zero, the wheel, spread far beyond the people who first hit on them. Seeing the same problems solved in parallel on different continents is much of the point.

Each question describes a people, ruler, city, invention or event without naming it, and offers four choices. The explanation then gives the dates, the place, what the thing actually was, how we know, and why the wrong answers are tempting. Where a freely licensed photograph shows a landscape or a monument that sets the scene without simply being the answer, it appears with the question; where a picture would give the game away, the question is left as text.

An ancient-world quiz sticks because each answer anchors a chain of consequences that runs to the present: the alphabet, the 60-minute hour, coined money, written law, monotheism, democracy, the dome. Learn who smelted the first iron, who cut the first coins, who carved the first code of laws in public, and you are learning where the modern world quietly comes from. The wording is kept plain, and every claim has been checked against reliable sources.