Mesopotamian Mythology Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which god of wind, air and storms was for much of Sumerian history the effective ruler of the gods and of the land, holding the Tablet of Destinies, from whose holy city of Nippur kingship had to be blessed to be legitimate?

Question 2

What was the name of the great Babylonian New Year festival, held over about eleven days in spring, at which the creation epic was recited, the statue of Marduk processed out of the city and back, and the fates for the coming year were fixed?

Question 3

Which boatman ferried the dead, and then the living Gilgamesh, across the Waters of Death that no one else could touch and live, using a set of stone objects and long punting poles that had to be discarded after a single touch of the water?

Question 4

Which ancient southern Mesopotamian city, sacred to the sky god and the goddess of love, was the seat of the hero-king Gilgamesh and is often called the world's first true city, its great mud-brick walls said in the epic to be his lasting monument?

Question 5

What is the name of the roughly 1750 BC collection of about 280 legal rulings, carved on a black stone pillar topped by a relief of the king receiving the rod and ring of authority from the seated sun god of justice?

Question 6

What is the name for the colossal stone guardian figures, with the body of a bull or lion, the wings of an eagle and the bearded, horn-crowned head of a man, that stood in pairs at the gateways of Assyrian royal palaces?

Question 7

Which two-faced god served as the vizier and messenger of Enki, the god of wisdom, looking forward and backward at once, and carried his master's instructions and his refusals between the deep and the other gods?

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About Mesopotamian Mythology

The myths of ancient Iraq are the oldest written stories we have, first set down in Sumerian before 2000 BC and carried on in Akkadian by the Babylonians and Assyrians for two thousand years more. This quiz covers them in eighty questions. Each describes a god, a hero, a demon, a creature, a text, a city or an idea, and asks you to name it from four choices, then explains the story and how it survived on clay to be dug up and read again only in the last 170 years. Where a figure has both a Sumerian and an Akkadian name, both are given.

The first pack is the major gods and the shape of things: the sky father Anu, the storm-ruler Enlil, the clever water god Enki; Inanna, goddess of love and war, and her descent to the dead; Marduk of Babylon, who kills the sea-dragon Tiamat and builds the world from her body; the moon god Nanna and the sun god Utu; the mother goddess Ninhursag; the death queen Ereshkigal and the plague god Nergal; the shepherd Dumuzi who dies and returns; the weather god Adad; the great gods called the Anunnaki and the striking lesser gods, the Igigi; the war god Ninurta; and Gilgamesh and Enkidu.

The second pack goes deep into the three central stories. The Epic of Gilgamesh: Humbaba and the Cedar Forest, Shamhat, the Bull of Heaven, the flood survivor Utnapishtim, the alewife Siduri, the ferryman, the stolen plant of youth, the scorpion-men at the mountain of the sun. The Babylonian creation epic: Tiamat's consort Kingu, the Tablet of Destinies, the first gods Lahmu and Lahamu, Apsu's schemer Mummu. The Descent of Inanna: the demons called the galla, the gatekeeper Neti, the loyal minister Ninshubur. Plus the flood epic of Atrahasis; more gods, Ashur, Nabu, Ninlil, Nisaba, Gula, Nammu; and the famous demons and guardians, Pazuzu, Lamashtu, the Anzu bird, the winged bull lamassu, the fish-sages, and the divine powers called the me.

The third pack is the setting and the rediscovery: the cities Uruk, Nippur, Eridu, Ur, Babylon and Nineveh; the ziggurat and the invention of cuneiform; the Sumerian King List with its impossibly long reigns; the New Year festival where the king was ritually slapped; the law stone of Hammurabi and the blue Ishtar Gate; the paradise land of Dilmun; the first named author, Enheduanna, and the first empire-builder, Sargon of Akkad; the priest Berossus who passed the myths to the Greeks; George Smith reading the flood tablet in 1872; the Behistun cliff that unlocked cuneiform; the counting by sixties we still use for time and angles; and Nebuchadnezzar the Second. Because a captioned artefact usually gives the answer away, images are used only where a museum object or a site photo does not, and everything has been checked against standard reference works.