Egyptian Mythology Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for the ancient Egyptian underworld or realm of the dead, a dangerous otherworld of gates, caverns, lakes of fire and hostile demons through which both the night sun and the newly dead had to journey?

Question 2

Which beetle, which the Egyptians saw rolling a ball of dung across the ground, became a powerful symbol of the rising sun rolled across the sky, of spontaneous creation and of rebirth, and was carved in vast numbers as amulets and seals?

Question 3

What is the name for the looped amulet resembling an ankh with its arms turned down, often made of red stone or glass, that is understood as the knot or girdle of Isis and was placed on the mummy to bring her protection?

Question 4

What is the name of the column-like symbol with four cross-bars near the top, understood as the backbone of Osiris and as a sign of stability and endurance?

Question 5

What is the name for the long straight staff with a forked base and a head shaped like a stylised animal that gods and kings hold in countless images as a sign of power and dominion?

Question 6

Which pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty abandoned the traditional gods in favour of a single one, the sun disc, closed the temples of Amun, built a brand-new capital in the desert at what is now called Amarna, and changed his own name to honour his god?

Question 7

Which household god was shown, unusually, full-face rather than in profile, as a bandy-legged, bearded dwarf with a lion's mane and ears and often a protruding tongue, who guarded homes, mothers and especially children and drove off snakes and evil spirits with noise and dancing?

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About Egyptian Mythology

Ancient Egyptian religion ran for more than three thousand years, and its gods, symbols and ideas about death fill the museums of the world. This quiz covers it in eighty questions. Each describes a deity, a creature, a place, an object, a text or a concept, and asks you to name it from four choices, then explains the role it played, the myth behind it and how we know about it. The picture is drawn from across the whole span, from the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom to the Greek and Roman period, and where the sources differ, which they often do between one city and the next, the main variants are noted.

The first pack is the major gods and the shape of the cosmos: the sun god Ra and his nightly battle; Osiris, Isis, Horus and Set and the murder that binds them; Anubis, Thoth, Hathor, Amun, Ptah, Sekhmet and Bastet; the earth-and-sky pair Geb and Nut and the air god Shu who holds them apart; the self-made Atum; Ma'at, who is both a goddess and the principle of cosmic order; the chaos serpent Apophis; and the family of nine gods called the Ennead.

The second pack fills in the rest. More gods: Sobek, Khnum, Khonsu, Mut, Neith, Montu, Nefertem, Heka, Hapi, Bes, Taweret, Wadjet, Nekhbet and Wepwawet; the primeval waters called Nun; the heron-like Bennu bird behind the Greek phoenix; the demon Ammit who waits at the scales. The Osiris myth in detail, the coffin trick and the eighty-year lawsuit between Horus and Set. And the machinery of the afterlife: the Duat, the weighing of the heart, mummification and canopic jars, the ka, ba and akh, shabti figures, the Book of the Dead and its older cousins the Pyramid and Coffin Texts, and the great symbols, the ankh, the Eye of Horus, the scarab, the djed pillar, the was sceptre and the uraeus.

The third pack steps back to creation, cult and legacy: the eight gods of Hermopolis, the primeval mound and the benben, Ptah's creation by thought and word, the dawn god Khepri, the solar boat; the great sacred cities Heliopolis, Abydos and Thebes; the living Apis bull and the composite god Serapis; the pharaoh as Horus and son of Ra; hieroglyphs and the Rosetta Stone that unlocked them; the paradise called the Field of Reeds; the Great Sphinx; the Opening of the Mouth ritual; the Nile flood and the star goddess Sopdet who announced it; and the pharaoh Akhenaten and his one god, the Aten. Because a captioned tomb painting almost always gives the answer away, images are used only where a site photo or an ambiguous object does not, and everything has been checked against standard reference works.