Ancient Civilizations Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which ancient monument, a double gateway faced with glazed blue bricks moulded into rows of bulls and dragons, was built as the grand northern entrance to Babylon around 575 BC and now stands, reconstructed from excavated fragments, in a Berlin museum?

Question 2

What is the name for the massive stepped platform-tower, built in receding tiers of mud brick with a shrine on top, that stood at the heart of the great cities of ancient Mesopotamia such as Ur and Babylon?

Question 3

Which Indian mathematician and astronomer, writing in 499 AD at the age of 23, gave a strikingly accurate value for pi, worked out the length of the year to within minutes, and argued that the daily turning of the heavens is really the Earth spinning on its axis?

Question 4

Which Arab trading people grew rich as middlemen in the incense trade and carved a city of temple facades, tombs and a famous columned 'Treasury' into the rose-pink sandstone cliffs of a narrow desert canyon in what is now southern Jordan?

Question 5

What was the name of Rome's earliest written body of law, set down around 450 BC after ordinary citizens forced the aristocracy to make the rules public, and displayed on bronze in the Forum for every citizen to see and, schoolboys were expected, to memorise?

Question 6

Which Egyptian god, usually shown as a man with the black head of a jackal or as a crouching dog, presided over embalming and the tomb, and was pictured weighing the heart of the dead against a feather to judge whether they could pass into the afterlife?

Question 7

Which hilltop site in southeastern Turkey, dated to around 9600 BC, consists of rings of massive carved T-shaped limestone pillars, raised by people who had not yet taken up farming, pottery or metal, and who then deliberately buried the whole complex?

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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.