Mesopotamian Mythology Quiz — 10 Free Questions

Question 1

Which underworld god, a throne-bearer of the queen of the dead and a guardian of the gate, was closely associated with snakes and with trees, and is often shown as, or with, a serpent with horns, or with two snakes entwined rising from his shoulders?

Question 2

Which warrior god, a son of the chief god Enlil, was also a patron of farming and healing, and won back the stolen Tablet of Destinies from a monstrous bird, and in another poem killed a demon of the mountains and organised the world afterwards?

Question 3

Which god sat at the head of the earliest Mesopotamian pantheon as the remote sky father, the source of all authority, whose very name was also the ordinary word for 'sky', and whose chief city was Uruk?

Question 4

Which loyal attendant and minister of the goddess Inanna was told, before her descent to the underworld, that if she had not returned in three days he must go in mourning dress to the great gods and beg them to save her?

Question 5

Which god was the moon, crossing the night sky in a boat, and the divine father of the sun god and of the goddess of love, his principal seat being the city of Ur with its great stepped temple-tower?

Question 6

What is the collective name for the highest gods of the Mesopotamian pantheon as a group, originally understood as the children of the sky god, who assign destinies and, in the underworld, sit as judges of the dead?

Question 7

What is the name for the counting system based on the number 60 that the Mesopotamians used for mathematics and astronomy, and which survives today in the way we divide an hour and a minute, and a full turn into 360 degrees?

Question 8

Which ruler founded the first empire in history around 2334 BC, uniting the cities of Sumer and conquering lands from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, and left a legend that he was born in secret, set adrift on the river in a reed basket sealed with pitch, and raised by a gardener before the goddess of love made him king?

Question 9

What were the pitiless underworld demons who climbed back up to the land of the living clinging to the goddess of love, refusing all offerings, and demanding that someone go down in her place?

Question 10

Which Sumerian poem tells how the goddess of love, wanting to extend her power, sets off for the realm of her sister the death queen, is forced to remove one item of clothing or jewellery at each of seven gates, and arrives naked and powerless to be struck dead and hung on a hook?

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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.