Ancient Civilizations Quiz — 10 Free Questions

Question 1

Which legendary king of the Sumerian city of Uruk is the hero of the world's oldest surviving long poem, in which he befriends a wild man, kills a forest giant, spurns a goddess, and then travels to the ends of the earth in a doomed search for immortality after his friend's death?

Question 2

Which very large Neolithic settlement in central Turkey, occupied from about 7100 BC, was a honeycomb of mud-brick houses packed wall to wall with no streets between them, so that people walked over the rooftops and climbed down ladders through the roof to get indoors?

Question 3

Which ancient city, on the Euphrates in what is now Iraq, was renowned for terraced 'hanging' gardens counted among the Seven Wonders, for a brilliant blue-tiled processional gateway, and for the tower that inspired a famous biblical story?

Question 4

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 5

Which ancient religion of Persia, taught by the prophet Zarathustra perhaps around 1200 BC, worships a single wise creator god of light, Ahura Mazda, sees history as a struggle between truth and the lie, and keeps a sacred flame burning in its temples?

Question 6

Which teacher, wandering from state to state during a time of Chinese political collapse around 500 BC, taught that social order flows from ritual propriety, family duty and rulers who lead by moral example, in sayings his students later gathered into the 'Analects'?

Question 7

Who, king of Macedon at 20 and tutored as a boy by Aristotle, destroyed the Persian Empire in a decade of battles, led his army as far as the Punjab, and died of a fever at Babylon in 323 BC at the age of 32?

Question 8

Which people's habit of counting in groups of sixty is the reason an hour has 60 minutes, a minute has 60 seconds, and a circle is divided into 360 degrees?

Question 9

Which enormous grid-planned city in the Valley of Mexico, laid out along a broad avenue between a Pyramid of the Sun and a Pyramid of the Moon, housed maybe 125,000 people at its 6th-century height and was already a deserted ruin when the Aztecs came upon it centuries later and gave it its name?

Question 10

Which official of Han China wrote a sweeping history of the Chinese world from its mythical beginnings to his own day, setting the pattern for 2,000 years of dynastic histories, and finished it after choosing the disgrace of castration over suicide when he angered the emperor?

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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.